Beyond Deconstruction From Hermeneutics T - Alberto Martinengo

Beyond Deconstruction
Beyond Deconstruction
From Hermeneutics to Reconstruction
Edited by
Alberto Martinengo
De Gruyter
ISBN 978-3-11-027323-6
e-ISBN 978-3-11-027332-8
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Contents
Alberto Martinengo
Deconstruction at its End? Preliminary Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . .
Section I
Deconstruction and/or Reconstruction:
A Philosophical Approach
Emmanuel Cattin
Leaving Philosophy? Heidegger, Bauen, Lassen . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
13
Jorge Prez de Tudela Velasco

Waiting: The Impossible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
27
Jean Robelin
Does It Make Sense to Speak about Deconstructing the Subject?
39
Graziano Lingua
Beyond the Eclipse of Reason: On the Reconstruction of
Rationality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
53
Jean-Marc Ferry
Towards a Reconstructive Critique of Historical Reason . . . . . .
69
Evelyne Grossman
Creative Delinking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
85
Section II
The Limits of Deconstruction:
The Case of Art and Literature
Timo Kaitaro
Reality under Construction: Deconstruction and Reconstruction
in Surrealism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
97
Clive Cazeaux
Deconstructing and Reconstructing Artists with PhDs . . . . . . . .
107
VI
Contents
Franca Bruera
Towards a Dramaturgy of Suspicion: Theatre and Myths in
20th-century France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
135
Giulia Boggio Marzet Tremoloso

A Methodological Comparison between a Mythocentric
Approach and a Deconstructive Reading in the Interpretation of
Rewritings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
149
Maria Spiridopoulou
Translation: Theory and Praxis. Deconstruction and
Reconstruction in Giacomo Leopardi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
161
Antonella Emina
Deconstructing and Reconstructing Built-up Landscape in
Post-Colonial Literature: Damass Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
179
Section III
The Genealogy and Legacy of Deconstruction:
The Politico-Social and Juridical Point of View
Jordi Maiso
Remembrance of Nature within the Subject: Critical Theory,
Psychoanalysis and the Limits of Subjection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
197
Herman W. Siemens
The Rise of Political Agonism and its Relation to
Deconstruction: The Case of Chantal Mouffe . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
213
Flavia Monceri
Just Tell Me Who You Are! : Do We Need Identity in Philosophy
and the Social Sciences? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
225
Alberto Andronico
Daydreaming: Derridas Contribution to the Theory of Law . .
239
Jnos Frivaldszky
Law as Practical Knowledge: Deconstruction, Pragmatism, and
the Promise of Classical Practical Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
255
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
277
Index Rerum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
295
Name Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
297
Deconstruction at its End? Preliminary Remarks

Alberto Martinengo
The cultural phenomenon that Friedrich Nietzsche characterised as a
malady of history is perhaps one of the most glaring manifestations of
his lasting actuality. It is not difficult to point out its nether presence
today, far beyond the bounds of philosophy, in the infinite variations
of one unique commonplace reference: that of the crisis or the decline
of modernity. Its pervasiveness is a matter of fact and, as is well
known, produces a crucial shift in the self-comprehension of a broad
spectrum of disciplines, which concerns the Humanities as a whole.
The premises connected to this phenomenon are evident from multiple points of view. As has been convincingly highlighted, they primarily
address the possibility of isolating a compact cluster of events qualified by
the category modern age, wherein the present seeks to distinguish itself
more or less definitively. This is a presupposition that accrues all the advantages (as well as the enormous disadvantages) of succinct formulae
and 20th-century philosophy bears ample witness to such ambiguous implications. But along with this sort of toponomastic hindrance, the jargon
of crisis poses another kind of question, one having to do with the rhetorical power of such a rupture. To invoke a series of categories that have
fallen into disfavour, but which nonetheless partially retain their significance, the fortunes of notions such as crisis and decline are marked by a
crucial oscillation between purported statements of fact and explicitly
performative valuations. In short, the claims of a discontinuity with respect to the category of modernity play at double cross: on the one
side, the objective recognition of a breakdown, for example in terms of
an epochal shift with which it would by now be impossible not to go
along; and, on the other, the need to make this declaration once more
so that it can be truly realised.
If this rhetorical indecision is one of the most effective (although ultimately also debilitating) engines driving the jargon of crisis, it is not
hard to locate its most notable precedent. Of course, this would be the
case for Nietzsches claim that God is dead, in aphorism 125 of The
Gay Science. The madmans rant provides the most striking example of
the intertwining of constative and performative utterance which has so
Alberto Martinengo
powerfully defined the epochal analyses in the 20th-century debates. Undeniably, this was a potent and portentous development, but one which,
as critics were quick to point out, also contains another element, that extends far beyond Nietzsche. This is the tendency on the part of such analyses to generate a range of prophecies that, in the most extreme versions,
present the objective risk of transforming philosophical reflection into an
entirely self-referential discussion. Together with the jargon of crisis, this
tendency toward self-fulfilling prophecy is the other topos (or, better, the
other vexata quaestio) of the contemporary debate. But this is not all.
These two cultural features are so deeply entrenched that they have
come to produce their own overturning. We can thus say that, through
a vertiginous acceleration of the malady of history, the epitaphs of the
20th century have rapidly passed to a second-order obituary: from secularisation to theories of the post-secular, from the death of the subject
to the retrieval of the self, from anti-metaphysics to a new metaphysics,
from the end of modernity to the return of the modern.
The case for deconstruction

Undoubtedly, deconstruction plays an important perhaps crucial role
in this context. The more this role is evident, the closer we look at the
essential characteristic of Jacques Derridas approach: deconstruction
is systematically a style of thinking rather than logically coordinated premises and conclusions. A series of important consequences follows from
this initial determination. First and foremost is the impossibility of speaking of a truth of deconstruction, except in contradictory, and thus rhetorical, terms. Deconstruction cannot be true in the way that a philosophical theory might be, because its validity depends entirely on its implementation as a resource implicit in philosophical discourse. That is, deconstruction works if, and only if, a text yields to the deconstructive approach, while at the same time one could hardly imagine a text which resists or holds out against it. In other words, one could say that the deconstructive purpose is dissatisfying, spurious, or, even more, inconclusive,
and yet it is difficult to find a way to decisively refute it. If this is the
case, it is clear why deconstruction is one of the most powerful resources
of the 20th-century debate, far beyond the boundaries of philosophy. The
insistence on aspects of style is precisely the most evident factor (though
not the only one) which has rendered deconstruction applicable over a
wide range of fields, rather than encompassing a collection of shared assumptions.1

These two essential characteristics (i. e. an overriding emphasis on
style, combined with the impossibility of determining its truth) legitimately situate deconstruction within the categories which we are examining here. Yet, its success as a critical instrument also provides a specific
measure of the third element that should be highlighted, that is, the apparent redundancy that troubles the jargon of crisis. Seen in this light, the
approach seems now to consider such categories as a kind of cultural
mode that has become outdated, and as such, requires a definitive overhaul of its methodological features. A real conflict of interpretations appears to be at stake here, which paradoxically combines two different instances of self-fulfilling prophecy, with a peculiar effect of dissonance:
along with positions which basically reaffirm the central premises of deconstruction, one also finds positions which significantly modify those
premises, and other positions which reject them altogether. This highly
contentious scenario seems inescapable if one attempts to enter into
the recent discussions on Derridas legacy. While this approach might assume different forms, it will always draw more or less explicitly on presuppositions of this kind. For the particular case of deconstruction, the
difficulties become complicated after the fact because of its characteristic
inter-disciplinarity. But there is at least one point that seems perfectly
simple and straightforward. If one looks at the diverse camps involved
in those debates, it is not difficult to recognise (albeit in an approximate
manner) one of the sources common to these criticisms. Although delivered differently, the critical reference is directly or indirectly made to the
ethical and political irresponsibility of deconstruction.
It is not among the aims of the present volume to draw a map of Derridas reception in the 20th century, neither from a disciplinary point of view, nor in geographical terms. In this regard, the classical point of reference (even if by now
somewhat outdated) continues to be Schultz/Fried 1992. Nonetheless, it is useful
to draw attention to texts which stand out for their relevance to the specific questions addressed in this book, leaving aside those of strictly philosophical import.
With regard to literary studies, it is worth mentioning, among others: Norris
1982; Arac/Godzich/Martin 1983; Culler 1985; Royle 1995; Kronick 1999;
Kates 2008. For political issues, useful references include: Beardsworth 1996;
Norris 2000; Resta 2003; Regazzoni 2006; Cheah/Guerlac 2009. Finally, for
law: Cornell/Rosenfeld/Carlson 1992; Andronico 2002; Goodrich/Hoffmann/
Rosenfeld/Vismann 2008; Legrand 2009.
Alberto Martinengo
At least for philosophy, we are dealing with a reprimand that probably finds its most significant voice in Hilary Putnam. In fact, it is to Putnam and the reading of deconstruction in his book Renewing Philosophy
(1992) that we owe perhaps the most unequivocal formulation of the
problem. As is well known, the core of his analysis is the charge of a
strong link between the Derridean problematisation of the notion of
truth and the collapse of any objective criteria to which we might entrust
the burden of a socio-political critique. According to Putnam, it is the
threat that deconstruction poses, and the theoretical programmes which
share its premises, that is, those which problematize the notions of reason and truth themselves, downgrading as primarily repressive gestures
the concepts of justification, good reason, warrant, and the like.2
This is the real core of his critique. Deconstruction is a sophisticated
re-edition of the ancient forms of scepticism and all the suspicions applicable to the latter are equally applicable to the former. Hence the thesis
according to which the equivalence between truth and repression is, in
short, a dangerous view, because it provides aid and comfort for extremists [] of all kinds.3 And, for Putnam, it is only a short step from this
argument to its conclusions, conclusions which sound almost like a manifesto: The philosophical irresponsibility of one decade can become the
real-world political tragedy of a few decades later. And deconstruction
without reconstruction is irresponsibility.4
2
3
4
Putnam 1992, 132.

Putnam 1992, 132.
Putnam 1992, 133 (my emphasis). Of course, along with Hilary Putnam, one
cannot omit mentioning Jrgen Habermas and his Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity, especially the Lecture VII, Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of
Origins: Jacques Derridas Critique of Phonocentrism (see in particular Habermas 1990b, 181 f.), as well as the Excursus on Leveling the Genre Distinction
between Philosophy and Literature (Habermas 1990b, 185 210). As is well
known, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity opens an important page in
the relationship between Habermas and Derrida. For a recapitulation of this debate, which lasted about two decades, the most useful reference is still undoubtedly Thomassen 2006. Nonetheless, what follows will clarify why a reference to
Putnam (or better, the Putnam of Renewing Philosophy) might be more immediately functional for the argument here. And this is a major reason for the particular connotation that, in fact, Putnam gives to the concept of reconstruction in
contrast to Habermass use of the term, which moves along a very different horizon.
Beyond deconstruction
Thus, in that text dating back to the beginning of the 1990s (and within
a reflection that might have led to very different conclusions), Hilary Putnam explicitly indicates an impasse, while at the same time designating an
exit from deconstruction. However, today, Putnams critical manifesto
also offers another advantage, one which might be considered unintentional. His analysis furnishes us with a very realistic image of the redundancy of which we spoke, that is, of the reciprocity through increasingly refined specularity between two conflicting epochal predictions: on
the one hand, the exhaustion (already accomplished) of logocentrism,
and on the other hand, the end (imminently anticipated) of deconstruction. Yet, it is easy to see that this astounding effect is not only a matter
regarding the reception of Derrida, but touches the development of deconstruction itself. In short, if Putnams charge deals mainly with the
ethico-political dimension of deconstruction, we cannot ignore the centrality that such a dimension would have gradually assumed in the later
phases of Derridas thought. Without going too much into controversial
periodisations, undoubtedly the development of Derridas position
emerges from the steady increase in the multiplicity of themes it encompasses, starting from a nucleus which remains relatively stable. And the
ethico-political questions do establish part of this evolution.5 In this
case, we can definitely affirm that it is the same Derridean thought amplifying the tension between opposite motives, which deal above all with
the impact of philosophical discourse upon the public domain.
In other words, Putnams critical manifesto seems to portend a tension within Derridas thought itself. For these and other reasons, it
might be a valuable undertaking to decontextualise Putnams reading
from the specific theoretical intentions that sustain it and to use his
claim as a sort of heuristic tool to rethink the current debates on deconstruction. This kind of decontextualisation would intentionally leave
aside Putnams philosophical outcomes in order to focus exclusively on
the conceptual dyad of deconstruction and reconstruction. This shift is
even more conceivable in the context of the years following the 1990s,
during which Derridas appeal along with the hermeneutic and postmodernist camps of contemporary thought undeniably suffered a significant decline of influence. For the reasons cited above, this does not
5
Of course, this is the case for Derrida 1994c and Derrida 1997e, which are true
detonators that animate the last ten years of his production.
Alberto Martinengo
signal the assertion of any causal nexus between Putnams criticism and
the reorientation of that discussion. On the contrary, it deals with a possible shift in the cultural milieu, whose consequences are diverse: they
range from those which mainly deny the reality of a crisis in deconstruction, to those which, on the other hand, emphasise the scope of this crisis
and suggest radical alternatives to the Derridean project. Obviously, between these two extremes, there is a great number of intermediate solutions, difficult to classify within historiographically definite categories,
but deriving their specificity from the diverse disciplines in which they
are situated.
This hindrance is part and parcel of Derridas legacy today. The variety of contesting positions is so wide that it calls for a critical assessment
to achieve a unified theoretical schema. The dyad of deconstruction and
reconstruction might be a useful starting point to address this need. Of
course, any enterprise of this kind must provisionally discount an initial
difficulty, one that is perhaps unexpected. Each of the disciplinary fields
influenced by the Derridean project is in fact cultivating specific antibodies in response to the shifting conditions of the ongoing debate. This has
produced a secondary effect that can be measured on the macro-scale of
its consequences. If the deconstructive koin generated a certain lexical
homogeneity in fields of study connected to it, the current evolution
seems to have provoked a rupture in this transdisciplinary common
coin. This rupture has occurred to the degree in which the Derridean critique entered diverse fields with a determinate effect: the temporary encounter among different outlooks and methodologies (to which, in fact,
Derrida had contributed) seems to belong to a recent past, but one that is
now closed.
The essays contained in this volume respond to this cluster of demands. The contributors belong to diverse fields of study and have
very different backgrounds, including: philosophy, literary studies and
law. These varied starting points allow the authors to remark upon deconstruction from their own perspective, thereby demonstrating the spreading influence of the deconstructive lexicon. However, this kind of testimony also allows each contributor to take a stand, either explicitly or implicitly, with respect to the history of Derridas reception, even in its present state of disintegration. Thus, the volume seeks to compose a kind of
map, or, better still, a mosaic, of the current (post-)deconstructive Babel:
essays that investigate specific aspects of Derridas reception have been
placed alongside contributions that study the implications of deconstruction beyond its original scope. However, this is not in order to articulate a
common theoretical position, as the reader will see. This aim has been set
aside from the outset. Instead, the sheer variety of the chapters indicates a
variety of perspectives that faithfully draws upon the actual complexity of
the problem, whether this is taken to be historiographical or, more likely,
theoretical. But this is not all: the methodological approaches adopted by
the authors are also multiple. Thus, the section entitled Deconstruction
and/or Reconstruction: A Philosophical Approach brings together essays
closely related to a specific philosophical tradition, as with the contribution of Emmanuel Cattin on Martin Heidegger, the essay by Jorge Prez
de Tudela Velasco on Derrida, and, lastly, Jean Robelins intervention on
the notion of the subject as conceived in debates around deconstruction.
Alongside these essays are contributions that cover questions transversally
related to different schools. Advances in this category come about
through Graziano Linguas study of the genealogy of reconstruction,
Jean-Marc Ferrys investigation of historical reason, and Evelyne
Grossmans work on creative delinking in literary and philosophical practice. This overlap of different disciplinary perspectives is still more evident in the second section, The Limits of Deconstruction: The Case
of Art and Literature. Here we include essays dealing with the impact
of deconstruction on issues in aesthetics along with others that examine
its contribution to art theory and literary studies. These investigations
range from Timo Kaitaros exploration of surrealism to Clive Cazeauxs
essay on contemporary art; from the contributions by Franca Bruera
and Giulia Boggio Marzet Tremoloso on the rewriting of myths to the
interventions of Maria Spiridopoulou on the problem of translation
and Antonella Emina on the construction of identity in post-colonial literature. The volume concludes with the section entitled The Genealogy
and Legacy of Deconstruction: The Politico-Social and Juridical Point of
View. It includes essays that take as their theme the politico-philosophical implications of deconstructive motifs, even outside a strictly Derridean context: the contribution by Jordi Maiso on Theodor W. Adorno,
the essay by Herman W. Siemens on Chantal Mouffe, and the intervention by Flavia Monceri on the concept of identity in the social sciences.
Finally, the relevant (and ambiguous) impact of deconstruction on legal
theory is investigated in the essays by Alberto Andronico and Jnos
Frivaldszky.
As the reader will see, considerable space is given to contributions
which deepen the (sometimes unexpected) connections between deconstruction and themes that are not directly implied in Derridas reflection.
This choice is all the more crucial in light of the inevitable polemical im-
Alberto Martinengo
plication that the decision to take stock of deconstruction might be taken

to carry today. In fact, the charge of (ir)responsibility is based on the hypothesis that we have indicated above, that is, on the existence of a causal
connection between two key notions implicit in Putnams critique: the
abandonment of logocentrism and the extra-philosophical consequences
of Derridean thought. Clearly we are dealing with a potent theoretical
premise, but one that carries with it a series of presuppositions that cannot easily be dismissed. To what degree is it possible to eliminate the risk
of producing a radical short-circuit between the two terms in question,
thereby transforming a serious problem into mere rhetorical posturing?
In other words, is Putnams (and many others) equation between deconstruction and irresponsibility a faithful reading of Derrida? Or does it become an accusation that would charge the Derridean legacy with a complicity, the evidence for which cannot be found at the scene of the crime?
To obviate this risk, the course chosen by this volume is to accept
completely the argument that there has been a change of the cultural ambience compared with the years during which deconstruction justifiably
celebrated its great early triumphs. However, at the same time, we will
systematically avoid the mistake of once again falling into the typical
schema of those predominant cultural trends which either uncritically
support or merely seek to demolish an intellectual hegemony. To achieve
this aim, the contributors in this volume and this project as a whole
have chosen a particular method. They intentionally keep alive the polysemy embedded in the notion of reconstruction, inserting this complexity
into formulations that differ greatly, sometimes taking a more polemical
stance, sometimes more conciliatory toward the deconstructive tradition.
Such an array of diverse contributions has one consequence which seems
both relevant and desirable: that of deemphasising the contrast between
deconstruction and reconstruction, thereby allowing the volume to escape
any reductive conclusions. On the one side, this dualistic schema seems
able to provide a paradigm that usefully clarifies some issues in the debate
around deconstruction. Yet, on the other side it risks appearing unfaithful
to current cultural debates as a whole, which are richer (and more ambiguous) than such a binary might suggest. The emphasis on the polysemic
dimension of reconstruction is perhaps a salutary antidote to this outcome and allows for a better understanding of the questions that are
on the table.
In sum, to paraphrase Aristotle, one could say that today reconstruction is said in many ways. 6 In the contributions which follow, its prevailing
connotation is undoubtedly a heightened sensibility to multiple frameworks of meaning, far from the deconstructionist mistrust toward categories traditionally employed for such aims. And yet it is impossible to return its semantic field to a single theoretical reference, because this would
mean reducing its multiple inflections to a univocal genealogy. Conversely, it is necessary to recognise (to use another Derridean category) that reconstruction is a bastardised notion, a word with too many fathers, that
tends to complicate itself as one gradually registers its extension, more or
less explicitly, in the contemporary debate. It is a bastardised notion, but
also, and perhaps for the same reason, it seems fruitful, judging by the
yield of its outcomes.
Translated by Wilson Kaiser
As a matter of fact, the polysemy of the notion of reconstruction is clearly witnessed in the current debate, at least in the field of philosophy. Habermass and
Putnams contribution has already been discussed here. Yet, one cannot omit recalling other authors who refer to the lexicon of reconstruction, from diverse and
sometimes opposite perspectives. To mention but a few of them, it is the case
with Gianni Vattimo, who emphasises the question in an essay, symptomatically
entitled The Reconstruction of Rationality (see Vattimo 1997). Not by chance,
his purpose is to undertake a critical dialogue with Derrida, in order to advance
philosophical hermeneutics claims on rationality. More recently, on a very different front, the reference returns in an admittedly realist and anti-hermeneutical
perspective: see Ferraris 2010, the starting point of which is exactly Putnams
reading discussed above. The question also returns to the spotlight in the current
Frankfurt School debate, where the notion of reconstruction becomes the core of
an entire purpose (a sort of philosophical manifesto) focusing its role in public
discourse. This is typically the case for Jean-Marc Ferry. Among his writings,
the most relevant in this sense are Ferry 1991b; Ferry 1996; Ferry 2004. For further references to Ferrys reconstructive purpose, see also Lingua 2012.
10
Alberto Martinengo
Acknowledgments
This volume had its origin in a research project (EW09-217: Public Reason between Deconstruction and Reconstruction) financed by the European Science Foundation, the Centro Studi sul Pensiero Contemporaneo
(Italy), and the Istituto di Storia dellEuropa Mediterranea of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Italy). The results gathered in these pages
are indebted to their generous support. The activities connected to the
research and the publication of this book would not have come to fruition without the contributions of Giulia Boggio Marzet Tremoloso
and Shelley Campbell. The project also owed much to discussions with
Graziano Lingua and debates with Franca Bruera, Antonella Emina,
Paolo Heritier, Federico Vercellone. The development of specific aspects
of the volume was greatly enriched by the advice and suggestions of Gaetano Chiurazzi, Sebastian Hsch, Dan Lazea, Federico Luisetti, Christopher Norris, and Teresa Oate y Zuba.
Section I
Deconstruction and/or Reconstruction:
A Philosophical Approach
Leaving Philosophy? Heidegger, Bauen, Lassen 1

Emmanuel Cattin
Let us begin with a few German words, a verb and its complements,
which, during the 1960s, gave to the thinker who had thoughtfully meditated and chosen them the direction of a task, the indication of an increasingly apparent necessity. Whether a twilight task or a necessity,
they are from a time when, maybe imperceptibly, light was changing,
though unbeknownst to those already engulfed in the shift. In the Dmmerung that had enveloped those times, these words indicated the task of
a departure, the need to move on. Today we can read these difficult
words, which above all we should never neutralise, at the end of the
Zeit und Sein lecture, delivered by Heidegger on January 31, 1962 at
Freiburg-im-Brisgau, and collected in 1969 in Zur Sache des Denkens.
The verb by that point had become the most decisive and the most important in his thought. The verb was: lassen. A prefix was added, ber:
berlassen. But in this case, its complements in the passage rendered
the verb even more difficult to understand. The first of these complements was: die Metaphysik. The second one, no less enigmatic, was simply: sich selbst. The passage in question reads: Therefore, our task is to
leave all overcoming, and leave metaphysics to itself.2 For those who
are wondering what the task of thought is today (if, indeed, such a
task remains), or in other words which necessity grips us, these words
with their enigmatic simplicity might once more transmit the essential
orientation of something unfinished. It is easy to see that such an unfinished task becomes apparent only through leaving all we have accomplished up to the present, even if we do not measure the meaning or understand the sacrifice that such an abandonment would require. But concerning the question that we can make here our own, of destruction or
deconstruction, it might be today radically overcome. With the rising of
1
2
I am grateful to Tom Jones, who helped me to translate the original French version of the present text. This essay will appear in my forthcoming book, Cattin
2012.
Darum gilt es, vom berwinden abzulassen und die Metaphysik sich selbst zu
berlassen. Heidegger 1993, 25.
14
Emmanuel Cattin
this final necessity, it is as though the question revealed itself, through

such an overcoming, already inaccessible to us. Whether we accepted it
or not, we were somehow apart from every construction or deconstruction and all they might still reach, as though deconstruction were already no more commensurable with this epoch. But we are moving too
quickly. Heidegger above all has not only meditated the meaning of
Bauen and Abbauen. For him the latter, Abbauen, was primarily a path,
before he returned to the former, Bauen, in order to think it and, together
with it, the process by which its essential meaning was forgotten. In a difficult conjunction, this forgetting joined with the absence of thought
which our present illustrates at every turn. Let us begin by recalling
what kind of path destruction and deconstruction first were. In the unfinished book to which the 1962 lecture relates, Destruktion was a title of
a task stemming from the Geschichtlichkeit of Dasein, that is, from a
mode of being pertaining to Dasein. Such a mode of being turns Dasein
toward what is called tradition. Tradition does not belong to the past or
rather the past as tradition does not follow behind, but precedes Dasein,
geht ihm je schon vorweg. 3 Tradition is the way which opens up at every
moment before us, and which Dasein follows. It precedes us, pushes itself
further than us. But if tradition itself can be hidden, and therefore is calling for a discovery (Entdeckung), however, insofar as it is dominant, it is
also always covering and hiding. It covers, not what it would block in its
dominant, oppressive transmission, but rather what would be historically
defeated and would then implore from the past to be saved (Walter Benjamin was the thinker of such an imploring call emanating out toward us
from an unresolved past, which aims at us because of its distress). No, but
it covers precisely what it transmits. In its transmission tradition distances
itself from the necessity of returning to its inaugural meaning, to its provenance, to its rising. Tradition in its own essence is uprooting. 4 Forgetting is
not incidental in tradition, it belongs to it essentially: transmission means
covering. In the language of Sein und Zeit, tradition is a feature of the
decay (Verfallen) of Dasein. From this perspective the meaning and the
significance of Destruktion as a task perhaps become clearer. Destruktion
is oriented toward the originary experiences (auf die ursprnglichen Erfahrungen).5 It is the destruction of tradition, or rather of the back3
4
5
Heidegger 1984, 6, 20.

Die Tradition entwurzelt die Geschichtlichkeit des Daseins. Heidegger 1984,
21.
Heidegger 1984, 22.
Leaving Philosophy? Heidegger, Bauen, Lassen
15
ground transmitted by tradition (des berlieferten Bestandes). In 1927, Bestand certainly does not yet mean the being which is exclusively dominated by the phenomenon of enframing (Gestell), but it already points out
the process by which the initial meaning is obscured through its transmission. However, Heidegger first of all will part from this unilaterally negative meaning of destructive in order to gain the range of significance,
necessarily ambiguous, of an insight that will attempt to trace, to delimit, to measure, abstecken, tradition by marking its positive possibilities,
that is, its limits. The destructive insight establishes a limit in a past
that, while it was once a source, now appears as a resource. Heidegger
does not claim that destruction is without negation. But the negative destruction is not carried out upon the past. Rather, it is upon the present
that destruction performs the work of negation that its name involves. In
other words, destruction is negative at one remove, obliquely, destroying
the present which covers the originally directive experiences of the past. It
is not a matter of having done with the past once and for all. Instead, the
negation will be accomplished quietly upon the present: Die Destruktion will aber nicht die Vergangenheit in Nichtigkeit begraben, sie hat
positive Absicht; ihre negative Funktion bleibt unausdrcklich und indirekt.6 Though quietly negative, destruction will be no less radical and
sudden, for its vocation is the manifestation of the necessity (Unumgnglichkeit) of a task, our task in 1927, namely the repetition of the question about the meaning of Being.7 For Heidegger destruction was essentially the clearing of a place or a field: ein Feld kontrollierbarer Auseinandersetzungen, a field of controllable explanations.8 But was this field truly
the field of control? Even if it was a matter of repeating originary experiences and retrieving the phenomenon, as emphasised in 7 when it
clarified the rigour and necessity of the phenomenological way, in
1927 it was as yet unforeseen what sort of opening (Erschlieung)
might occur. Destruction took its necessity from the question to come,
not the opposite, and the question itself, still unapparent, remained entirely uncontrollable. Destruction is not the task itself, but the path,
the unique one, even if it is not the path in isolation, leading to the
point at which it begins to open up. It is only at this moment that it
makes itself a task. If Heidegger wrote Destruktion here, elsewhere he
had chosen Abbau, or even used both words indifferently, to name the
6
7
8
Heidegger 1984, 23.

Heidegger 1984, 26.
Heidegger 1984, 27.
16
Emmanuel Cattin
task, in an almost military tone, to progress (vordringen) by way of a

deconstructive return [im abbauenden Rckgang] toward the original motive sources of the explication which today is dominant and covering.9
But is all this now not too far, maybe even out of reach? If Heideggerian phenomenology as early as the 1920s could already think of itself
as the necessity of a construction which required destruction,10 the deconstructive return both traversing and destroying tradition (or rather the
present in which the covering is accomplished) also leads Heidegger
much further to (or at least will not divert him from) the meditation
upon Bauen in its strange proximity to Denken, at the point where
they become two modes of Wohnen. This constellation radically changed
when, on August 6, 1951, Heidegger delivered in Darmstadt the lecture
Bauen Wohnen Denken, and such a leap would necessarily be disorienting. There, the question concerned every kind of Bauen, and not only the
task of thought. However, that which was already referred to as forgetting in 1927, though measured neither in its profundity nor in its consequences, nonetheless continued to appear under this name. After the
war, every form of Bauen together with Denken engulfed by it, appears
in front of us, as if they issue from the same workshop (Werkstatt) as
two traits of Wohnen, which itself is a trait, and even the Grundzug of
the being of mortals insofar as they are mortals.11 Let us follow the necessary disorienting effect of this new constellation, before we move on to
consider Lassen. At the Darmstadt lecture, printed in the 1954 book just
after the broadcast lecture Was heit Denken (Munich, 1952) and before
the lecture Das Ding (Munich, 1950, the second version of the Bremen
lecture in 1949), Heidegger shows from language itself, the silence of the
language that does not speak, das Schweigen (for language is essentially silent in its Sprechen), or its not yet meditated secret, in which language
itself withdraws its own originary dimension,12 how Bauen belongs to
Wohnen. Here Bauen is a trait of habitation, is itself Wohnen, and
Bauen is the meaning of being mortal as earthbound. We are insofar
9 Heidegger 2007, 168.
10 Destruction as deconstruction, Abbau, was in 1927 implicated in the construction (Konstruktion), in which Heidegger aimed to reduce the being to Being, insofar as this reduction was not and could not be exclusively negative, but envisioned Being from the already given project of the being. See Heidegger 1989,
29 30.
11 Heidegger 1959, 162.
12 Exactly: das Ursprngliche dieser Bedeutungen. And further: Die Sprache entzieht dem Menschen ihr einfaches und hohes Sprechen. Heidegger 1959, 148.
17
as we dwell, Heidegger writes.13 Or we might say: insofar as we build.

For such a being-dwelling, such a being-mortal nothing else is in question but the meaning of their being is deployed by Heidegger in accordance with the dimensions of Geviert. Its fundamental trait appears as
Schonen, to treat gently, fulfilled in the simplicity of the Aufenthalt
bei den Dingen. This stay is itself a Lassen, a letting-things-be-themselves.
Thus the accurate double sense of Bauen, as Pflegen and as Errichten, will
appear.14 But we have forgotten what language says by silence, what it
withdraws, for example, forgetting the meaning of being-mortal, of
dwelling, and through it of taking care as well as of building, of things
themselves. Now, if we have lost the essential being of Bauen, this forgetting is even more profound than what could be historically understood
and was already overwhelmingly apparent by 1951. This distress is
older and more radical than what we witnessed in die Weltkriege und
die Zerstrungen, which nonetheless belongs to this distress, the distress,
die Not, which has yet to be meditated.
In the 1951 lecture, what is Bauen, the necessity of which surrounds
and situates mortals? What is the building and the dwelling to which it
belongs and the loss of which means distress? What is Bauen, in this
Abendland that earth has now entirely become, where mortals stay or
can no longer stay, either East or West?
Is the secret and far-off, perhaps even ungraspable kinship between
the deconstructive return into tradition and the distress that calls us, provided it is gathered in a Bedenken, such a distress that we can name it Heimatlosigkeit, even if we cannot think it yet, and is such a call to a Bauen,
which would be aus dem Wohnen and fr das Wohnen,15 not the same as
the one which the 1951 lecture made out between Bauen and Denken?
Denken stood in the proximity of Bauen, both of them referring to the
same focal dwelling. And, though it is seen from the end, was not deconstruction already, even if the access to it is difficult, when it was in the
service of the question of Being and the phenomenological repetition
of an originary experience, on the way (indivisibly positive and negative)
to a Wohnen, at least to a meaning of Being, which indeed understood
itself differently, but still in the Dasein as its most proper trait? But the
13 [] als die Wohnenden sind. Heidegger 1959, 149.
14 Heidegger 1959, 152. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm translated immediately colere,
aedificare. They later established themselves the connection with Ich bin from
sein, as with wohnen.
15 Heidegger 1959, 162.
18
Emmanuel Cattin
Rckgang, the return, as it becomes clearer, has to radicalise in departure.

Deconstruction might still remain under the sign of the glance back (zurck), and even of a coming and going through tradition, until it reached
what was called das Ursprngliche. However, such a return to the Greek
experience of the question was itself no simple matter, but took its necessity from the question to come which we must find a way to ask. But then
should it not be still possible to be, to become Greek? Were we not then
these Greeks who had in front of them the task (not a simple one) of becoming and becoming over again Greek? We were not yet those who have
now in front of them the attempt at being no more Greek. There was no
Heideggerian reconstruction, stemming from a Destruktion, but the final
radicality of this abandonment of metaphysics, the irreversible nature of
such a Lassen (even though it might be accessible but only makes itself
available to us for the first time through a backward glance), does not
leave us today with any possibility of remaining the same, of becoming
the same. We must now consider the radicality of such a Lassen, of
such an berlassen. What does it mean to speak of leaving or abandoning metaphysics? This is the most difficult and the furthest point from
any deconstruction and any reconstruction, this last one inaccessible, if
at least the prefix should indicate the restoration of that which had
been irreversibly undermined and ruined such a reconstruction was
never and never will be within our power though it is again for us a
matter of Bauen and Denken. Let us now take a closer look at the end
of the 1962 lecture.
Lassen as a task is not destined merely to open a new path. This glance
into what is becoming will not delineate the contours of a new epoch,
nor the strange, uncomfortable no-mans land that separated epochs
into a singular history. We do not live anything new in that sense.
Reiner Schrmann with his pellucid insight never ceased to insist on
it: if the present carries within itself the mark of an end, it is the absolutely final end of epochal figures of Being, as the Protokoll which followed Zeit und Sein recorded it.16 We are standing in an interval, zwischen, but that which finishes and that which begins, whose beginning announces itself with signs that are still far away, do not belong to the same
history, if we have to understand in history the range of every epochal
economy to a singular unfolding, changing, turning constellation. The
two sides of the Zwischen where we are standing do not go together,
and in this measure they do not join in a singular history. The name
16 Heidegger 1993, 56. See Schrmann 1986; Schrmann 2003.
19
that Heidegger gave to such a Zwischen is Ge-stell. As an enframing which

marks times in its double face, the Ge-stell requires a double glance: Dieses, the Protokoll reads, ist gleichsam eine Zwischenstation, bietet einen doppelten Anblick, ist so knnte man sagen ein Januskopf. 17 That which is
coming remains incalculable, the Incalculable itself. But the Ge-stell is the
accomplishment of that which comes to an end, its heightened intensification, such is its first face: Es kann nmlich noch gleichsam als eine Fortfhrung des Willens zum Willen, mithin als eine uerste Ausprgung des
Seins verstanden werden. In this measure, we are still standing under the
sign of Being, under its mark: that is, in the field of philosophy itself,
belonging to it, to that which it thought, or under the will that wills nothing other than itself. As a prolongation of the will which wills itself, the
epoch is a terminal one, but such an endpoint is also station that endures. The enframing in this sense, in its fury and its ravages, as Schrmann once translated Entrckungen,18 already contains the immobility of
this endpoint. But this endpoint is itself ambiguous. The more this endpoints exclusive hold on being is reinforced, the more its darkening embraces and removes any other possibility of unveiling, as the unique
masked face of !k^heia, the more fate is fulfilled the more another possibility begins, or the closer it comes to such a beginning. This other Anblick can just be glimpsed: Zugleich ist es (das Ge-stell) aber eine Vorform
des Ereignisses selbst. 19 According to this other measure, which is so difficult to glimpse, we stand already far off from this endpoint, but we did
not leave it completely. This distance can just be indicated, and its foreshadowing and signs remain enigmatic. Its name itself, Ereignis, was not
chosen without hesitation (Besinnen or Bedenken now always means: Zgern,20 and it is up to us now to hesitate, the most difficult is not to forego such a hesitation). The Zeit und Sein lecture provided at least an indication of that which should not be thought by the name of Ereignis. 21
The end of the epochal dimension was above all the end of the faces
or names of Sein: Ereignis is not a new name for Sein. Epow^, Heidegger
18 Schrmann 2003, 588. But the ravages or clearing out of the Beitrge have a
different meaning here. They are to be thought from the instant, from the temporalisation and the No which Heidegger sought to rejoin through them. In Gestell death with all its ravages is essentially inaccessible, withdrawing itself as
death.
20 Heidegger 1959, 113.
20
Emmanuel Cattin
noted in the course of the lecture, means: an sich halten. Through their
coherence, the epochs form at every instance a halt in what is a history
only insofar as it is a fate which is sent to us, Heidegger redirects the Geschichte to what has to be called more properly Geschick. 22 Such a redirection is still, in 1962, a destruction or deconstruction. This latter is indeed the only path. History effectively remains in 1962, a continual
covering, Verdeckungen, and nothing is achieved in history but the
same berdecken. That which is covered, mehr und mehr, is the initial,
as fate and sending, Schickung: die anfngliche Schickung von Sein als Anwesenheit. We thereby discover a reference back to our original question.
The only path through all that covers the beginning is still a path of deconstruction, Abbau, and Heidegger translates it once more: dies meint
die Destruktion, a translation where the negative is no longer nuanced
in any way, except perhaps by the quotation marks between which Heidegger puts the word. What, then, is the scope of such a destruction? Destruction is that which allows for an insight, an insight into that which
advances upon us, but only advances insofar as destruction will have accomplished such a letting-come, a letting-appear of that which is fate (Geschick). Destruction is nothing less than destruction of history (Geschichte), and if necessary it will also be the destroyer of the historicity
(Geschichtlichkeit) of Dasein: if necessary, that is, if the 1927 book could
not be read from the end, destruction will be fulfilled over Sein und
Zeit itself. But, in 1962, it remains the only possible path, der einzig
mgliche Weg. 23 Destruction is the path which turns fate into sending, Geschichte into Geschick, when this one is thought from the Es gibt, Es gibt
Sein. In this manner, to answer our initial difficulty, destruction is not
surpassed, but remains the unique exit from history, perhaps even from
the end of history, the final site where we stand. But as regards berwinden and berlassen, do they still belong to destruction? And what does
remain in Denken from Bauen?
Now let us turn to the second face of Ge-stell. Two traits Zug was
the name for what was until now a category of Sein can be discerned at
the end of the 1962 lecture, traits that we must keep in mind to begin to
grasp the meaning of berlassen. The meditation about Zeit and Sein
shows in Ereignis a proper, following which it shelters in its depths,
that is, its most proper, a No, the refusal or the reserve according to
which it does not move forward itself, in its heart, in !k^heia. In other
21
words, as Reiner Schrmann had understood it since the Beitrge of the

1930s, in order to elect and to elevate its duality to the level of the trait of
the tragic essence of mortality, indicating Being turned against itself: no
Ereignis without Enteignis. Zum Ereignis als solchem gehrt die Enteignis. 24
Ereignis does not give itself, it is rather that which withdraws itself. Such a
refusal since the Beitrge has its proper name: der Tod, which each time
bears witness. Every giving, every There is, Es gibt, shelters a retreat or a
refusal, a No, or shelters itself, and its innermost heart, in this negation.
Such a No is guarding, preserving, protecting: Bewahren. Death appears as a secret which is kept closed. The other trait, the other proper of
Ereignen is a second Gehren, a second belonging. It appears in Ereignis as
man belongs to it, or rather: belongs in it. But what is exactly shown here
by Heidegger? The most decisive is certainly this in: in das Ereignis. 25 In
virtue of this belonging, of this engagement within Ereignis durch sie
(die Vereignung) ist der Mensch in das Ereignis eingelassen through
which man receives the being-man, his most intimate trait, in other
words, his sense of being and sense in Being (als den, der Sein vernimmt),
man is no longer he who can see Ereignis, nor is he capable either of considering or representing it. We cannot think Ereignis metaphysically or
philosophically, we cannot think Ereignis in Greek. When such belonging
begins to open up, that which deployed itself until now as Vorstellen, Begrnden, and even: das nur aussagende Sagen, is no more accessible.26 We
can no longer speak the same language; we can no longer speak Greek. We
can no longer be or even become Greek.27 Our language could never be
able to say Ereignis, to say what it is, as we cannot put it in front of us, ein
Gegenber, nor even around us, as that which includes everything (noch
als das alles Umfassende). The engagement within Ereignis renders metaphysics impracticable, or rather, the path of metaphysical experiences,
only today, the impracticable. We cannot say what Ereignis is or that
there is Ereignis, nor even that Ereignis is. It would be, as Heidegger
24 Heidegger 1959, 24
25 Heidegger 1959, 23. I am grateful to Didier Franck and Alexandre Lowit for having indicated the significance of this point.
27 One of the most important and difficult texts on this point is the Gesprch (see
Heidegger 1959, 127), in which our task is laconically described thus: das griechisch Gedachte noch griechischer zu denken. Our insight remains Greek, will even
have to become more Greek, considering more originally what was thought in
Greek, but it perceives that which is, nevertheless, no more Greek, never more
Greek.
22
Emmanuel Cattin
writes with great precision in the metaphor, gleich als wollten wir den
Quell aus dem Strom herleiten. 28 Ereignis is the source to which language
cannot return without ceasing to be the language of the river which
comes from it, the language of Being, that is, Greek language. Such is
the attempt of Unterwegs zur Sprache in 1959. Through the destruction
of the Greek language, going beyond k|cor , the task is to listen to the
source, and thus, in the silence of Sprache for example in the strange
reduplication, in k|cor , of the subject by its verb, when the verb becomes
its own subject (das Ereignis ereignet, das Ding dingt, die Welt weltet) to
go no further than the same (vom Selben her auf das Selbe zu das Selbe, as
Zeit und Sein reads). Bedenken or Besinnen in this sense can be characterised as an attempt to think the Same, and its hesitation does not proceed without the radically disconcerting slowness of thought. Responding
over the years to the 1927 book, the insight into Ereignis, the non-Greek
insight (or is it still Greek?), which will speak or at least seek to understand a language which is no longer Greek, or says itself that which is no
more Greek, will thus lead up to such a Lassen, an Ablassen and an berlassen. What does it mean, then, to leave the overcoming itself ? It is possible to translate it exactly, however unfathomable it sounds: to think Sein
aus dem Ereignis; or: ohne Rcksicht auf die Beziehung des Seins zum Seienden; or simply, as Heidegger immediatly clarifies: Sein ohne das Seiende
denken. To think Being (Sein) beyond ontological difference itself, without a backward glance, without the least regard for being (das Seiende),
and it means: for metaphysics, which takes its law from being, ohne Rcksicht auf die Metaphysik. 29 This means (since it is necessary to bring matters to this point): thinking Being in a way other than philosophically, or
without regard for philosophy. Thus it is no longer a matter of overcoming. In this sense, the difference between berwinden and berlassen is
significant. In the overcoming or surpassing, the Rcksicht toward metaphysics still dominates. As long as such an insight is turned backward, it
can never overcome without regarding what it passes. But, leaving is an
entirely different departure. To leave is already entering into the separation, a separation that does not look backward, a departure with no return and no glance back. But it is possible that, with that kind of departure, deconstruction or destruction have themselves been left. Destruction perhaps has not finished with the Rcksicht, giving all its prodigal
regard to that which it destroys. Maybe it is itself the infinite leave-taking
23
of a tradition which, through its consideration, it still regards. How are

we therefore to understand that destruction remains, perhaps, the unique
path? It is possible that this path, very much ours and maybe even the
only one that opens before us, leads us to a domain in which it ceases
to be a path. The path of Destruktion opens up access to a domain in
which it is no longer a resource. At that point, we truly have an abandonment. But to abandon, to leave metaphysics, does not mean only a turning away, a having-done-with and, as though nothing happened, a new
beginning, as though we were able to begin again. Die Metaphysik sich
selbst zu berlassen is certainly and irreversibly to abandon philosophy,
but also to put and to give philosophy to itself, aus dem Ereignis, that
is, from a place and a regard that no longer belong to it, and which
are no longer Greek (or from a Greek insight from a non-Greek place),
but where philosophy belonged from the beginning without ever being
able to think it. Within Ereignis another perspective appears, one
which does not or will not refer to metaphysics, nor consider anything
other than giving it to itself from a wider domain. Es gilt, Heidegger
writes: It is worth. But immediately the necessity of an berwindung
which remains our task, is consigned. This berwindung will concern
(angehen) the Denken engaged in Ereignis, the Sagen which will say the
Ereignis, aus ihm her auf Es zu. 30 The overcoming to be accomplished
is that of language, within language, which will restore its secret, although
certainly not with the intention of breaking it, but rather by allowing it to
establish its proper silence, the pure Schweigen that abides in all Sprechen.
It is only in this place, the place of language, that the preserved sense
of Bauen will appear, beyond Destruktion, the only Bauen which remains
within our scope, and maybe even as a task, if the word still retains its
meaning outside the domain of will. The lecture Der Satz der Identitt,
which took place June 27, 1957 at Freiburg-im-Breisgau,31 will once
more situate Denken, when the question is about Ereignis, under the
sign of Bauen, in an entirely other meaning than the 1927 Konstruktion.
What happened in the 1957 lecture? The Ge-stell led Heidegger to meditate the proper, and the Ereignis as Vereignen (the appropriation of the
man to Being) and Zueignen (the appropriation of Being addressed to,
turned toward the essence of man). Heidegger designates the absolutely
unique character of Ereignis. This name takes on the role of speaking
31 Heidegger 2006, 46. I am grateful to Didier Franck for having referred me to this
fundamental passage.
24
Emmanuel Cattin
as a leading word in the service of thought.32 As Heidegger indicates,

translating or transposing it, bersetzen, is as impossible as translating
the Greek k|cor or the Chinese Tao. Ge-stell only presents itself as a prelude (Vorspiel) to Ereignis as it is thought as Er-eignis, thought from this
proper and this appropriation of the one to the other. But the prelude
might already bring us to the heart of our task, which we received at
the same time, or rather to the heart of that which presents itself as a possibility of a turning or a torsion, which now in Heideggers language is
no longer berwindung, but Verwindung. Turning, or torsion, or shifting
from the control of enframing, which comes aus dem Ereignis in dieses. 33
Then a new domain, Bereich, opens, or might open, or will open. In
marks the entry into a new domain. But what does domain mean
here? What are its traits? This is the most difficult point. Heideggers
marginal notes constantly attempt to say it in another way. But here
also begins the task of a new Bauen. Such a domain is der in sich schwingende Bereich, the domain oscillating in itself. One note gives an indication: schwingen und schweben noch ungem. This domain is strange,
oscillating or floating, it does not open anywhere as though it were waiting for us, but rather it ceaselessly opens and recloses. It does not open
without the closure of the domain of metaphysics, so that Being and
man in this domain lose the delimitations that metaphysics established
for them. How is such a loss, such a bareness accomplished? To lose, here,
is to quit, to leave metaphysics each time toward a new sense of Being
and man, if these names can still speak from their deep silence. Free
from metaphysics, Being and man take on another aspect in this domain. Now, this domain still means in 1957 to build or to construct
(Bauen): am Bau dieses in sich schwingenden Bereiches bauen. 34 What
does it mean, Bauen, or am Bau bauen, to work at building the domain?
Building is no longer metaphysical, it can no longer receive its meaning
from any presupposed foundation. Without doubt, this oscillation or
floating is the sign of the new fragility of the domain, which is no longer
established on a secure basis. To build in that last sense is now out of our
reach. Heidegger describes the Bauen which appears for the first time, the
Bauen of the oscillating, floating domain: Das Bauzeug zu diesem in sich
schwebenden Bau empfngt das Denken aus der Sprache. 35 Language is the
32
33
34
35
Heidegger
Heidegger
Heidegger
Heidegger
2006,
2006,
2006,
2006,
45.
46.
46.
46 47.
25
source and provides what will make building possible, while thought will
trust its silence to receive it from language. From now, building will begin
with language and deploy itself within language. But in what sense is language a source? Heidegger is going to provide a clarification: For language is the most delicate oscillation, but also the most fragile, retaining
everything in the floating building of Ereignis.36 Nothing refers such a
construction to what it was under metaphysics. Nothing continues to
tie it to what was the philosophical building, except perhaps destruction,
the unique path that will have led to it without itself inaugurating the
new domain, leading to something beyond itself. Such a Bauen, still so
indefinite, so fragile, just like language in its own silence, joins the Wohnen. Building or working to build is already an inhabiting within language for a man who no longer belongs to metaphysics, who is no longer
Greek, or perhaps who remains Greek in a no more, never more Greek
domain: To the degree that our essence is appropriated in language, we
inhabit Ereignis. But have we already entered this floating domain? Are
we already standing in this oscillating domain? Yes, undoubtedly we are,
but the question remains: who is this we, who is standing there, and in
what mode exactly, Greek or non-Greek? Are we already, and in what
sense, the inhabitants?
Does the 1957 question remain in suspense? Are we already, are we
still in a position to perceive the floating domain? And are we still able to
attend to the vibration, the oscillation of language? Has the path toward
the floating domain already opened to us?
36 Denn die Sprache ist die zarteste, aber auch die anflligste, alles verhaltende
Schwingung im schwebenden Bau des Ereignisses. Heidegger 2006, 47.
Waiting: The Impossible

I cant believe that! said Alice.
Cant you? the Queen said in a pitying
tone. Try again: draw a long breath,
and shut your eyes.
Alice laughed. Theres no use trying,
she said, one cant believe impossible
things.
I daresay you havent had much practice, said the Queen. When I was your
age, I always did it for half-an-hour a
day. Why, sometimes Ive believed as
many as six impossible things before
breakfast.
(Lewis Carroll, Through the LookingGlass, chap. V)
Quomodo cantabimus canticum Domini in terra aliena?
(Psalm 136)
1m l 5kpgtai !mkpistom oj 1neuqsei,
!meneqemgtom 1m ja %poqom.
(Heraclitus, DK B 18)
Let us suppose, for a moment, something impossible: that deconstruction

is (in a fixed and unmovable way) something. Were that the case, and
were we forced to risk and put forward something like a common feature,
a style or a radical essence of the deconstructive practice, we should say
this, in my opinion: that deconstruction is, above all, a purposeful bet on
impossibility. However, that this same bet acknowledges at the same time
the urgency and even the need to enable these same things declared unfeasible, and as we will see, is not the other face of a complex movement
that successfully avoids any over-simplification. The goal of this article is
to back up and develop this double assertion.
Let us start with impossibility. Throughout history at any point in
time in one way or another, deconstruction has been using its critical scal-
28
pel on many of the concepts that philosophy has regarded as fundamental. A constant result of its analysis has been to ascertain, in its opinion
without doubt, that these concepts are a group of fictions; fictions supposedly rooted in conditions of possibility that, as soon as they are set,
become incapable of achieving the perfection implicit in their definitions.
To be sure, deconstruction has not critically tested each and every intellectual construct offered by philosophy. Nevertheless, the power of its
tools is so great, and its work so meticulous (or apparently monotonous),
that in principle it could well be said that these operations of reduction
to impossibility have no limit; they can be regarded as extending to every
concept of the tradition, whether it is put to the test or not. As it is
known for deconstruction, a list of such concepts rightfully and strictly
would be endless. Since I do not have enough scope for such a disproportionate task, I will just cite, without limitation, some if few significant
examples of this theorem.
First example, first foray: it is asserted that philosophy has always
looked at an ideal like justice. Wishes so praiseworthy, such as achieving
a correct economic and social order, drawing up an adequate penal code,
attaining a serene conscience both personal and collective when analysing ones own actions, depend upon a full definition and organisation
of the concept of justice. Deconstruction does not dream of discussing
the importance of such a project, there is absolutely no doubt about
that. Neither is deconstruction shy when it comes to assert the urgent
need for defending, promoting, or making demands upon that project,
or actively fighting for its success. And the fact that it is interested in justice is not at all casual: when fighting for justice, deconstruction fights for
itself; because justice and deconstruction are in fact the same, as Derrida
states.1 However, this same deconstruction asserts that it can prove justice
as such, is impossible. As any other ideal, it is impossible because in order
to materialise perfectly, exactly and absolutely, it needs to conform to
rules that are equally and simultaneously valid, but contradictory in
their requirements. They are contradictory because justice orders: (a) to
take into account only the particular case, the specific person being
judged; but also requires that the decision be fair; and, (b) that the
said decision conforms to what is envisaged in a previous, universal, abstract, and homogenous law.2 No decision tensely suspended as it is between this double bind that at the same time creates and breaks it,
1
2
Derrida 1994a, 35.

Derrida 1994a, 51.
29
could then be said to be fully, wholly, presentably fair: because either it

does not conform to a previous rule (and then it is a decision, yes, but
not a fair decision); or, it conforms to the rule (and then it is fair, yes,
but not properly a decision). A fair decision, therefore, will only be a decision that obeying a rule retains in itself the memory of an always previous injustice, that its necessarily violent foundation is not only the first
rule, but also the decision incalculable of making a decision. It will be
said that this analysis deconstructs any wish that justice, as such, ever becomes reality. And, certainly, it is so. Except that, if it is so, it is as we
have seen and as Derrida warns because deconstruction operates from
the irreducible basis of an idea of justice that in its infinity, alien to any
rule, calculation or domination (by virtue, let us say, of its madness) puts
forward a requirement so unavoidable, so impossible to postpone, as it
acknowledges our infinite duty, our infinite responsibility toward the
other.3 We will come back to that.
Second analysis, second foray: throughout its history (a history that,
for the sake of convenience, can be regarded as spanning from Plato to
Heidegger), philosophy has kept the closest bonds of familiarity with
the idea, the problem, the experience of death. Since Phaedo assigned
as the main goal of philosophy to deal with death, both philosophy
and death walk together along a road whose last and most resounding
stretch perhaps has been, so far, to regard death as the ownmost possibility (or can-be) of the Dasein (Heidegger 1984, 50 53). Now, precisely in the work of the Heideggerian formulae wherein a whole tradition of reflection appears to culminate Derrida believes he listens
to the echo of an internal implosion that shakes the foundations,
maybe from the beginning, of that thousand-year-old conceptual structure. Because Heidegger, for whom possibility is determined (50) by
the pure and simple impossibility of the Dasein, would be the first to proclaim that with this risky and ambiguous formulation any progress in understanding that possibility will increase the freedom of insight into that
same possibility, now understood as impossibility, that is: as the very impossibility of existence in general (53). Considered as such, death, possibility of the impossible, appears then as an exemplary manifestation of a
strange possibility/impossibility logic that allows the possible to appear
as impossible. And that this analysis not many analyses are so violent
leads purposefully to consider whether death so understood constitutes
3
Derrida 1994a, 55.
30
a figure which can well be a substitute, by metonymy, for all that possibility which, if exists, can only be conceived as being impossible.4
Third analysis, third foray: philosophy, together with the common
sense that usually supports it, has always accepted the necessary possibility of translating between languages: is there not it argues an omnipresent separation between the content of a text, its meaning, and the
coded signifiers that transmit it? Now, as the biblical story of Babel shows
(or the Derridean lecture of the same), the essential translatability of
every language, in fact of every signification event, bars, forbids through
itself, from the very beginning, the rational dream of achieving a perfect,
final version, of the original text, which closes forever its continuous
opening to other translations, all of which are imperfect.5
Let us go on (it will be our fourth example). It is said that philosophy
has come into the world as a political theory. Furthermore: it is said (by a
philosopher like Cornelius Castoriadis, to take a case in point) that not
by chance was it born at the same time as democracy. And it is said
that its wish to found is extended, of course, to the founding of a common human life, between brothers: a p|kir. Nobody would doubt the accuracy of this opinion. However, for deconstruction that originating
foundation cannot be anything but the (necessary) founding of something impossible. Impossible because the p|kir is founded on friendship,
on vik_a. If there is anything decisive about the issue of vik_a, it is precisely that maxim attributed to Aristotle (Oh friends, there are no
friends!), which declares the ideal of a perfect friendship to be unrealisable: because in that ideal, the friend cannot but wish for the friend so
much good and perfection that, finally, he turns into a god i. e. into
someone that has no need to surround himself or herself with friends.6
We will talk, then (as one would have expected), of democracy, and of
the autonomous founding of a political system or of a society that, apparently, establishes its own rules, starting with its constitution and in an
entirely free and autonomous way develops a social contract. Now no
sooner read, this same theoretical approach of an original contract immediately shows its own constitutive contradiction, because: how can
this contract have the power to legitimate its signatories as new holders
of rights if, strictly speaking, said signatories can only acquire that condition precisely according to the contract, its signing and its coming into
4
5
6
Derrida 1986; Derrida 1996a.

Derrida 1987a.
Derrida 1994b, 250.
31
effect? A celebrated analysis by Derrida has applied this same logic to a

famous case of autoconstitution: the United States Declaration of Independence. A canonical text, almost sacred, in which Derrida highlights
not only the impossibility of distinguishing its declarative and performative aspects, but above all, the unavoidability and darkness of the mutual
contamination and involvement of the signatories and its declaration;
paradoxically, without this impossibility of clear separation, the very act
of emancipation would not have been possible.7
And what could we say (fifth example, fifth consideration) about this
gift, around which so many anthropological, economic, psychological
and religious explanations have gathered and woven together? We will
say this: that the only way for this gift to really occur is in a way that
in fact would cancel it. In other words, as a gift devoid of any sort of exchange, acknowledgment, credit or gratitude, yet necessarily circular,
which amounts to the same thing as saying that it is only possible in
its perhaps exemplary impossibility: because the gift is not, notes Derrida, simply impossible, but perhaps the impossible in itself, the impossible
as such.8 However, we will not stop the analysis at this point. Because that
analysis, as we are seeing, could well be repeated differently each time, ad
infinitum; so for example, its force can be applied to a concept so apparently understandable as that of forgiveness. We will then say that forgiveness is never forgiveness when it adjusts itself to what is reasonable or to
what is expected: when what is forgiven is the forgivable. And that on the
other hand, it is only when it adjusts itself to madness, to the unexpected
(the rationality that is subject to analysis as in that most singular experience of Abraham): when one forgives by virtue of that strange and unavoidable law that exclusively demands to forgive only the unforgivable;
an unforgivable that is always that, both before and after the forgiveness.9
I have put forward, with a savage brevity, no doubt, but with enough
force I expect a few samples of the deconstructive practice. Now, according to deconstruction the instances being analysed here are, as perhaps at first might have been thought, not sophistic constructions of a
capricious thinker, maybe anxious for fame. Quite the opposite. Above
all for deconstruction they are proofs. Proofs: with a rigour comparable
to that of a formal deduction, wherein the repeated deconstruction can
7
8
9
Derrida 1984a.
Derrida 1991, 17 f.
Derrida 1999b, 161 f.
32
bring to light the conditions of possibility that support the entire philosophical project. I will try to prove this assertion.
For deconstruction, if all the aforementioned is accurate, if those instances mentioned above are not the only examples of possibilities whose
possibility rests on its impossibility, and that list of examples could potentially be increased to include each and every one of the great or small
categories used in Western thought, then from its beginning, philosophy
has been built upon a supposedly unassailable foundation, which in actual fact has never been other than a trembling, blurred, unstable foundation. Thus from the beginning, philosophy has asserted the possibility
of identifying an Archimedean point from which, on which, or simply in
relation to which the rest of the building could be derived, ordered or
given sense (the building of the world, the building of knowledge or
the building of language). For philosophy, this nuclear, original concept
has not always been the same; even when it has been the same (because
perhaps sometimes it has been) it has not received the same names. Yet
for deconstruction the face of this last foundation or final point of reference is very clear: in principle, it is the face of the simple, of the one, of
the pure identity that is complex, plural, the multiple and illusory
game of differences, which is intended to be reducible. According to deconstruction, the big metaphysical tradition makes itself responsible for
setting the features of this face: according to this tradition, it is the
face of the presence. This presence is one that philosophy acknowledges
as fundamental in its multiple sense: presence before a subject, of course,
but also presence of this subject to himself, as well as temporal present
and/or donation or gift; together with these the presence as origin and
beginning from which what is absent comes to be regarded as product
and derivation must also be distinguished. According to this schema,
the ideal of an order that refers everything to the presence pervades
and seals our conceptual apparatus, any conceptual apparatus adjusted
to that model and the experience of the world based on it. The ruin of
that order, the proof that it is unfeasible (or the proof, as we have been
seeing, that only unfeasible becomes feasible), would bring with it the
ruin of any concept of all the concepts that depends on that order.
However, such ruin, proclaims deconstruction, is inevitable for various reasons: first and foremost, because according to Derrida presence is
never present. The possibility or the potency of the present is but its
33
own limit, its inner fold, its impossibility or its impotence.10 The second reason but not least is that this structure of binary opposition established in philosophy is unable to stand the test of its own criterion.
Therefore, philosophy establishes, for instance, as we have seen before,
that the opposition between what is primary and derivative is irreducible
and complete in nature. Notwithstanding, this very action of absolute
distribution is the action that prevents it from thinking of its own opposition, as it only has for this purpose the concepts it has separated. By definition, the problem is that none of the opposites thinks of itself as being
a constituent part of the opposition that in itself exceeds them. In this
way, the theoretical opposition between simple and complex, original
and derivative, present and absent, etc., by definition, can be neither simple nor complex, neither original nor derivative, neither present nor absent, etc. (however, it would not make sense at all if it were different from
these concepts that would be unconceivable). Accepting this argument
necessarily means that deconstructive work can no longer unconditionally
comprise the programme philosophical in nature that establishes the
precise delimitations of the conceptual field. Deconstruction replaces this
programme by the double affirmation (yes, yes) of a necessary contamination, displacement, invasion, parasitisation, etc., of original for derivative, present for absent, simple for complex, equal for different. There
will never be any clear-cut, delimitated oppositions, but a mutual and
complex implication, which, even in principle, obviously means that
the dream of achieving the purity of a presence, the goal and ending
of a transcendental meaning, the perfect identification of one self,
that dream cancels itself in the very moment that it has been formulated.
There is not, and never will be (and never has been), anything similar to a
principle. There is not, and never will be, anything like an indivisible
point. There is not, and never will be, anything like a splendid isolated,
autonomous, and immutable present, to which we associate the past and
future with complete clarity. All these ancient objects of metaphysical desire will have to give way to the absence of primarity, to the displacement
of positions, to the constitutive disturbance of the identical.11 The entire
series of known Derridean provocations can be inferred from this decision, which is not strictly initial, as it had always been established that:
10 Derrida 1981, 333. La prsence nest jamais prsente. La possibilit ou la puissance du prsent nest que sa propre limite, son pli intrieur, son impossibilit
ou son impuissance. Derrida 1972a, 336.
11 Derrida 1996b.
34
if there is no principle (start, origin, but also power of command, of

domination), only the secondary will be primary. Nothing proper can
escape from the work of the improper. The experience must be understood in terms of an infinite text of footprints in eternal referral to other
footprints, and so the indivisible and unitary finally becomes divided and
differential, like a buzzing tension that severs itself continually of its own
accord. In sufficiently technical terminology used for deconstruction, this
peculiar distribution programme of classic opposition in philosophy12
takes shelter under the constant referral to certain concepts of difficult delimitation, such as the concept of maybe (peut-tre) or the call for a certain quasi-transcendentality. In other instances, this is due to their acknowledged affinity (but not identity) with the concept of undecidability, at least according to Gdel, used to describe a large variety of metamathematical discoveries.
In light of such clarifications, it seems that it is now easier to comprehend the previous characterisation of certain classic referents of the act of
thinking as possible/impossible, as possible only in and due to its own
impossibility. Thus, possible and impossible is a pair of concepts, as
is the case of any other main conceptual pair in Western philosophy,
whose separation only seems feasible because of their inseparability. Furthermore, and following from what has already been said, it seems that
deconstruction is not entirely wrong when, during one of its few efforts
of (relative) self-definition, it acknowledges that it deals only with impossibility. This is just what can be read in Psych. Inventions de lautre:
The interest of deconstruction, of such force and desire as it may
have, is a certain experience of the impossible.13 A rather cautious statement (a certain) in its ambiguity, however, any reserve completely disappears in this one found in Force de loi: It [deconstruction] is possible as
an experience of the impossible.14 The author of both statements has not
limited himself by presenting his programme in such a generic manner.
On the contrary, in a reflective paragraph, he has actually made a
count an unfinished and open count, of course of all the times
when for whatever given reason deconstruction has issued a report of im-
12 Derrida 1972a, 367 368.

13 Derrida 2007, 15. Lintrt de la dconstruction, de sa force et de son dsir si elle
en a, cest une certaine exprience de limpossible. Derrida 1987b, 27.
14 Elle [la dconstruction] est possible comme une exprience de limpossible. Derrida 1994a, 35.
35
possibility for each of its objects of interest. Here is the text where he
mentions this aporetology or aporetography,
in which I have not ceased to struggle ever since; the paradoxical limitrophy
of Tympan and of the margins, the levels, or the marks of undecidability
and the never-ending list of all the so-called undecidable quasi-concepts that
are so many aporetic places or dislocations that it is a double bind or all the
double bands of Glas, the work of impossible mourning, the impossible opposition between incorporation and introjection according to Fors in Mmoires pour Paul de Man and Psych. Inventions de lautre [], that it is
the step and paralysis of Parages, the nondialectizable contradiction, the anniversary date that only occurs vanishing itself according to Schibboleth, the
iterability, namely the conditions of possibility as conditions of impossibility
scattered all over, and in particular in Signature vnement contexte et dans
Limited Inc, the invention of the other as the impossible in Psych, the
seven antinomies of philosophical discipline in Du droit la philosophie,
the gift as the impossible (Donner le temps) and especially, near these places
where questions regarding legal, ethical and political responsibility also involve geographical, national and linguistic borders, I would have been tempted to insist upon the most recent formalization of this aporetic present in
Lautre cap (dated from the Gulf War).15
This is from the text of Aporie, which as we can see, breaks down a long
list of impossibilities that could be thought of as complete. However, a
reader of Derrida is aware that this is not the case. He knows that in
other texts the emphasis is put on the impossibility of the dignified hospitality of that name, i. e. an unconditional hospitality,16 of ever finding a
15 Derrida 1993, 15 16. [] dans lequelles je nai cess de me dbattre depuis
lors, quil sagisse de la limitographie paradoxale de Tympan et des marges,
marches ou marques de lindcidabilit et la liste interminable de tous les
quasi-concepts dits indcidables qui sont autant de lieux ou de dislocations
aportiques quil sagisse du double bind et de toutes les doubles bandes de
Glas, du travail du deuil impossible, de limpracticable opposition entre incorporation et introjection dans Fors, dans Mmoires pour Paul de Man et Psych. Invention de lautre [], quil sagisse du pas et de la paralyse de Parages, de la contradiction non dialectisable, dune date anniversaire qui narrive qu seffacer
dans Schibboleth, de litrabilit, savoir des conditions de possibilit comme
conditions dimpossibilit un peu partout, en particulier dans Signature vnement contexte et dans Limited Inc, de linvention de lautre comme limpossible
dans Psych, des sept antinomies de la discipline philosophique dans Du droit
la philosophie, du don comme limpossible (Donner le temps) et surtout,
pr s de ces lieux o
les questions de responsabilit juridique, thique ou politique
concernent aussi les fronti res gographiques, nationales ou linguistiques, jaurais
t tent dinsister sur la formalisation la plus rcente de cette aportique dans
Lautre cap [dat de la Guerre du Golfe]. Derrida 1996a, 35 36.
16 Derrida 1997a, 71.
36
name deserving to be called proper,17 of ever determining a context absolutely,18 of ever making total sense or own sense.19 Yet again, we are able
to make a generalisation: deconstruction is inventive. One of the characteristics in this field of work may as well be invention. However, we have
to reach the same conclusion as before: the only possible invention for it
would be the invention of the impossible.20 We stress this point once
again: the impossible is not regarded as a pure and simple opposite of
the possible or something that should be taken away from speculative
and practical interest on the grounds of its impracticality. On the contrary, if impossibility is examined, if deconstruction only focuses rigorously
on impossibility, then this means that this impossibility, in its impossibility, clings to the most ambiguous and obscure but also most inexorable of
all relations, not only with possibility but also with what is required. Is it
by chance that I chose the above examples of possibility/impossibility,
such as justice, hospitality and forgiveness, which seem to be relating
more to urgent and necessary matters, or to that which is in greatest
need in this world of ours?
The peculiar relation between possibility and impossibility draws out
the idea that impossibility can never be pure, i. e. something that would
be sensible to reject. Contrary to this and in virtue of its close relation
with possibility, impossibility is an expectable even the most expected
event. Within this context, thinking profits from the deconstruction
of a basic distinction which has not been examined yet, despite being presupposed in everything that has been said so far: the distinction between
two categories which are at first glance total opposites and omnipresent
in philosophy such as event and essence, singularity and universality, unrepeatable and repeatable, unexpected and foreseeable. A
thought unable to conceive of their mutual relation has been feeding
on the alleged autonomy of one of each set and its corresponding opposition. Deconstruction here as always, destabilises the border between the
other of each until the impossible and unexpected becomes, as we have
said before, something which maybe will be what it should be, namely,
something which is still to come; something like democracy21
which is bound to occur. In this attempt, against all hope and logic, to
17
18
19
20
21
Derrida
Derrida
Derrida
Derrida
Derrida
1967a; Derrida 1967b; Derrida 1980; Derrida 1982.

1990b.
1972a, 290.
1987b, 59.
2003b.
37
expect the unexpectable, it is in this very attempt, I daresay, that deconstruction seems to lead toward the most powerful consequences in its
concept of itself, i. e. its concept of reflection. Deconstruction aims to
be, above all else, the most extreme exercise (an exercise that in turn is
undeconstructable)22 of lucidity. A radicalisation of the critical spirit
for which crisis, or a certain general state of crisis, seems an omnipresent
feature from the beginning in everything there is. As such, thinking is its
ground. However, thinking is nothing other than actually making come
or letting come any event of decision or responsibility.23 Insofar as it
thinks, and thinks of the urgency of letting come, maybe, the only
thing that being impossible needs more help and cooperation, deconstruction only develops a programme that, in its own opinion, draws
in turn its own model .
We are told that deconstruction could be defined as preparing oneself
for the coming of the O/other.24 Moreover we can say of the sole O/
other which, due to its inexpectability, we need to expect: the impossible.
Hesitant but firm in its hesitance, deconstruction is conceived by itself as
reflexive work on the apories constitutives of the thought that, as has been
said, can only be endless, never-ending, infinite like hope, like waiting.
As a matter of fact, the feat to accomplish is an enormous feat, since from
the moment it deconstructs the distinction, extremely useful for hermeneutical and pedagogical purposes, between central and marginal, relevant and superficial, prompts us to examine in its gloomy light, each
and every historically-produced element of philosophy, literature, science
or any other textual practice. Nothing is alien to it, not even itself: from
the moment it belongs to this legacy, deconstruction imposes, no matter
what it says about its own invulnerability, a deconstruction of itself whose
first task could be to verify the real demonstrative character, or not, of its
reasoning and demonstrations. It is true that this hypothetical evaluation
of successes and defeats of a movement such as deconstruction would
not be exempt from violence. At a level of unification, how do you assess
a stream of reflection that has caused turmoil within the very concepts of
unity, assemblage and totality? How does one establish oneself in a supposed beyond, a reflective device that has altered the separation of external and internal, transcendence and immanence? However, this may not
be the most pressing task presented by deconstruction. Instead, it may be
22 Derrida 1994a, 35.
23 Derrida 1993, 16.
24 Derrida 1987b, 53.
38
that which consists in showing how philosophy, at its foundation, has actually been unable to express properly, using its categorial apparatus, the
hiding face of the event, of the unexpected, of singularity. An incapability
that, together with the reconsideration of the ancients, calls for an invention of new concepts, new words, new logics with which we will be able
to prepare for the coming of events, such as justice, democracy, forgiveness or hospitality, which are as unadjournable as unrealisable. The fact
that this continuous practice of critical reading, fiercely attentive, is a
meeting point for logic (shadows of Lewis Carroll) and the Bible (shadows of the psalmist, singer of the impossibility of singing, in a foreign
land, the hymns of the Lord), and knowledge (shadows of Heraclitus, expecting the unexpected) confirms the suspicion that deconstruction, in
the crossroads of multiple traditions, wonders about unadjournable matters, both old and new, both archaic and futuristic and always without
an answer.
Does It Make Sense to Speak

about Deconstructing the Subject?
Jean Robelin
It may seem unhelpful now to question a discourse about the deconstruction of the subject. Jacques Derrida himself resolved that query. But also
psychoanalytical interpretation of the subject is globally described as deconstructive, especially when it emphasises the impossibility of a subject
to control the totality of symbolic actions in which he is involved. The
attempts of some German sociologists criticising the social forms of the
capitalist subject emerge as deconstructive in nature, especially the criticism of the enterprising self.1 In one of his films entitled Deconstructing
Harry, Woody Allen himself was answering this question in his own way.
The use of the word deconstruction is therefore inflationist, and
even Derrida puzzled over its unforeseen success. It makes sense to ask
if the word did not simply take the place of the old dialectic having
been made obsolete through the fall of Marxist orthodoxy. Undoubtedly
that victory may nevertheless make us suspicious: the discourse about deconstruction might have lost any specificity becoming totally indeterminate.
In an especially insightful article,2 and having in mind the idea of
clearing the idealistic mood of Heideggers criticism against subjectivity,
Manfred Frank lucidly recalls that Schlegel undertakes true deconstruction of the subject. For instance in his article On Incomprehensibility,
Schlegel insists that the subject is unable to master the different regimes
of meaning he uses. He argues that attempting to master these systems
only leads to deeper confusion: I wanted to demonstrate that we obtain
the most perfect and the purest incomprehensibility of science and art, of
philosophy and philology, which, by themselves, aim at comprehension
and intelligibility.3
1
2
3
Brckling 2007.
Frank 2007, 117 138.
Schlegel 1967, 363.
40
Jean Robelin
Proceeding this way, he advances Derridean analysis through a long

history of thought: from a broken self, of an I or a self which is an
other. Of course, we could object that deconstruction itself even its
thinkers who are sensitive to the limits of the subject and to the impossibility of the subject to master his symbolic acts argues against reducing Derrida to an appendage of German Idealism. However, Frank asserts
that Derridas thought is only an example of the philosophy of reflection,
which is the core of German Idealism. If it aims at diminishing the identity of being to the identity of reflection, Derrida would agree with it in a
special way; he would think about the opposition between the identity of
being and the identity of reflection. Thus, there would only be partial
unity, the characteristics of the self would be constructed in the opposition between the two reflects.4
Any interpretation revealing an implicit part in a discourse, its internal relationships, or even unnoticed contradictions becomes what is
known as deconstruction. We can then ask about what deconstruction
is not and conclude: much ado about nothing. In other words, the question itself What is deconstruction? proves inadequate. But the negative
enquiry What is not deconstruction? becomes inevitably circular as any
answer to this question implies a positive definition. Simply stated, Derrida authorised this criticism. While discussing philosophers in Deconstruction in a Nutshell, he defines deconstruction as follows: It is an analysis which tries to find out how their [philosophers] thinking works or
does not work, to find the tensions, the contradictions, the heterogeneity
in their corpus.5 When he tries to justify the transition from the analysis
of texts to the deconstruction of a real entity, the terms stay the same: In
the case of culture, person, nation, language, the identity is a self-differentiating identity, an identity different from itself, having an opening or
gap within itself.6 You cant get more German-idealistic than that.
It is here that deconstruction shows its equivocal character, and its
uses appear only metaphorical. It is widely understood that deconstruction appears first of all for Derrida as a way of analysing text; it helps
to clear up significations that are out of control, shifts in meaning and
internal cracks in a piece of writing. This essay, on the one hand, does
not lament the language incapacity to engulf meaning, but intends to
show that we cannot dominate it; on the other hand, the hallmark of ide4
5
6
Frank 1975, 283.

Caputo 1997, 9.
Caputo 1997, 14.
41
alism is the pretence of taming it. Without loss of meaning, can we remove ourselves from textual analysis and speak about deconstructing a
nation or even a human subject? This query relies on the idea that
these realities are also effects of meaning, which are governed by regimes
of meaning not totally consistent, in themselves nor between themselves.
This is precisely the metaphor that seems to govern Derridas metaphorical use of deconstruction, that is, the metaphor of the plurality of languages. In other words, deconstruction could mean that the same text
can be written in several languages, or at least is involved in several systems of meaning, and some of those systems of meaning are about nations or cultures. However, if it is true that meaning is charged with unmastered implicit significations, we must acknowledge that deconstruction has limitations due to its metaphorical nature.
Using metaphor in this way implies that the definition is less important than its use. The deconstructive praxis does not have the unity of
method. Sometimes Derrida characterises it as a strategy without finality.
Consequently, we must accept that there are several deconstructive gestures, and that deconstruction is not a univocal tradition. Thinking
along these lines answers those critics who reproach deconstructive thinking for being modelled on the supposed unity attributed to metaphysics.
Deconstruction opposes the unity attributed to metaphysics and in particular the unity of meaning which could allow taming and dominating
our way of thinking.
At the same time, deconstruction does not sustain an indeterminate
multiplicity. In his lectures, Derrida often compared deconstruction to
a crack in a plate of glass. The glass does not break but we are prevented
from thinking of it as being homogeneous, without any defect. In regard
to this thought, deconstruction is not a way of thinking antagonistically,
or initiating explosions of antagonism. When Allan Montefiore asks
whether deconstruction is a kind of dangerous nihilism exposed to the
risk of destroying any safeguard defending human rights, Derrida pointedly remarks that deconstruction does not aim to destroy things that
exist. He denies that he could increase the absurdity of our world. He asserts that being critical of meaning does not destroy it, but instead opens
new possibilities. Thus, we can say that deconstruction is reconstruction.
In this way, deconstruction locates ethical understanding not within a
subject who envelops, and is guarantee, source, centre and master of
his intentions. Ethical understanding, instead, comes about through the
subjects experience of being limited and acknowledging the impossibility
of self-possession. Consequently, deconstruction means that subjects are
42
Jean Robelin
non-identified with themselves. They are relational entities subsisting on

a primary inter-individuality:
I think to those people who would reconstruct today a discourse about the
subject, which would not be deconstructive, about a subject who would not
have anymore the figure of self-possession, centre and origin of the world,
but would define the subject of a non-identity with one self, of a non-deductible interpellation, as coming from the other.7
This is the first criterion of specificity and a deciding factor for analysing
the contemporary subject. If the contemporary subject appears to fragment into unsolvable contradictions, the metaphor of deconstruction is
useless. Deconstructing a text preserves its explicit consistency, even if singling out internal inconsistencies. We must consider if the actual situation of the human subject allows an external coherence to avoid exposing
it as broken, splintered into kaleidoscopic units, and in a state of turbulence because of contradictory tensions. We can look at it another way by
asking a different question: how can deconstructive thinking assist in analysing the contemporary subject? There is in Derridas thinking an implicit question without answer: why does this inter-individuality or interpellation of the other necessarily speak several languages? Why does it
imply an internal gap or an internal crack within the subject?
We might find this answer in a second characteristic feature that forbids reducing deconstruction to a kind of method. Deconstructive thinking is only possible if the analysed term deconstructs itself: Deconstruction is something that happens and which happens inside.8 Deconstruction is always a self-deconstruction. We can deconstruct the subject if it
deconstructs itself. We can find self-deconstruction in everyday life and
across a range of recent and present-day ideologies, as it happened
some years ago. People cross themselves out like a text pencilling out
its own effects of meaning. French television successfully aired the American show Persons Unknown wherein comic rhetoric consists precisely in
denying the characters own properties of interlocution. The qualities
of this kind of contemporary subject seem to destroy effects of meaning
at the point of producing them. This process seems to produce a man
without qualities. Effects of meaning are then the proper deconstruction
of meaning, as if the text were pencilling out its own properties. The selfpossessing subject, centre and master of its meanings, yields to a subject
splitting itself up by playing with its meanings. In 1966, the artist Piero
7
8
Derrida 1990a, 98.

Caputo 1997, 9.
43
Manzoni crossed himself out in his own profession by creating a piece of

artwork in the form of a can and entitled it, Shit of Artist.
Of course, this is the kind of experience that authorises me to speak
about deconstructing the subject in an unusual way, for example, without
referring to psychoanalysis. There is a social deconstruction of the subject, which I consider essential, because it explains even social pathologies
of human subjects. I would like to recall the work of Alain Ehrenberg
who considers nervous breakdown a symptom of managerial capitalism
(even if I do not endorse his claim that breakdowns are not linked to
the logic of culpability and prohibition that underpin traditional psychological experience). Let us also consider that any kind of socialisation of
individuals implies a way of splitting their bodies. For example, consider
how a modern flat divides its space: the room where you eat, the one
where you make love, the toilets; and then separate out the biological
functions of the body according to these divisions. In this kind of socialisation, and the correspondent relationships, gaps are created within the
subject, ending the narcissistic relationship to ones self (except perhaps at
University). The opposing regimes of meaning are variations of the internal gaps that refract or split the contemporary subject.
I want to offer some views about the social deconstruction of contemporary subjects, while showing how it is a ground for irreconcilable differences. At the same time, I want to keep in mind that a partial unity
may still survive despite intrinsic opposition. Derrida himself thought
that the internal discord of the human subject is historical and social. Social analysis, then, is a ground for a fruitful use of deconstruction.
The gestures and attitudes of a subject who deletes aspects of himself
are not new and they presuppose an historical treatment. One of the interests of the Shakespearean tragedy Richard the Second consists in showing a king, who, as he plays the part of a king, pretends to be a king. He
discovers the vanity of the two bodies and in particular the vanity of the
sacred character of the royal body. Then he flits between opposite regimes
of meaning leading to madness:
Thus play I in one person many people
And non contented: sometimes am I a king,
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am; then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king,
Then am I kingd again and by and by
Think that I am unkingd by Bolingbroke
And straight am nothing. But whateer I be
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Jean Robelin
Nor I nor any man that but man is

With nothing shall be pleasd, till he be easd
With being nothing. (Act 5, Scene 5)
The case of King Richard prompts us to ask, first, what is the unity of
this self-deconstructing subject, and, second, if it can avoid madness.
How can we define a unity with internal cracks but which does not explode? In the case of Richard, he characterises this kind of self-annihilation while walking around with open eyes.
The historical character of that kind of internal inconsistency can be
proven if we consider other forms of this type of inherent contradiction.
Consider Emma Bovary who was broken by the opposition between romantic dreams and ordinary mediocrity. We can also reflect upon those
bourgeois and romantic subjects, who considered themselves heroes of a
Promethean mythology of social progress, but instead were swimming in
speculative affairs at the borderline of corruption.
The first point about the internal gap of the contemporary subject
consists in a double-contradictory regime of meaning in our society.
On one hand, subjects are required to be autonomous, which is at the
same time asserted as a fact and an imperative. The notion of autonomy
corresponds to the action of an individual in its private sphere, but equally corresponds to competition. The subject must make himself better and
more marketable than his neighbour and create himself according to the
contingency of social roles. On the other hand, the subject is shaped by
social strategies of belonging to groups and communities that constrain
him, but which are totally different from those of traditional societies.
The proof of this is the renewed fashion of belonging to a community
which, in turn determines closed and fixed identities, for example, religious adherence, and even sects. If these affiliations become closed-minded and exclusive in religious spheres, a kind of identity emerges in the
same way that workers suffer from subordination in factories. The workplace becomes dependent upon modern means of communication: night
and day media connection through mobile phones and computers. Thus
workers, even those who are skilled, lose their privacy and become an appendage of the corporation, reduced to their economic function. To the
contingency of social roles there corresponds a division of social forces
and a concentration of economic and political power. Consequently,
the phenomena of social reproduction are multiplied.
In contemporary society the same kind of opposition can be found
again in consumption where the injunction to choose markets (when
45
you have some money) contrasts with the conformity to ways of making a living that takes the place of tradition. The multiplicity of desires
contrasts with its reduction to differences without effect; for example,
the car industry peddles all kinds of uninspiring optional extras. So-called
freedom of choice contrasts with prescribed preferences, mass desires and
needs, and conforming relationships between people. Market necessity is
achieved through targeting personal autonomy and inducing an anthropology of as if , where individuals act as if they were really enacting a
true freedom of choice.
The insecure constraint of self-testing and the threat of being underestimated lead people to safeguard their identity by projecting it onto an
exterior and closed community. In this way, reason is grounded through a
complexity of feelings that is in turn the ground for self-relationship by
defining our ways of acting and bearing upon the world. Adorno has
shown that men have an affective (because social) relationship to reason,
and this impersonality of rational arguing conflicts with the affective dimension of subjectivity, which has been built up by private and peculiar
interests, without universality, and by the ensuing competition with others. Correspondingly, the result of this opposition becomes cause for distress: From that point, the coldness inherent to objective arguing increases the feeling of doubt, of being isolated and of loneliness, from which
fundamentally today each individual suffers, and from which we try to
escape in hearing public discourses.9
The difference today is that individuals try to escape from those feelings by protecting themselves in specific groups. We can see a consequence of this perverted relationship to reason through the problem of
decision-making. Individuals are accountable. They are valued for taking
responsibility about their fate but economic instability and uncertainty
deny their decision-making power.
Fixed identities conflict with the kaleidoscopic character of the fragmented desires that come about through the activity of consuming. The
self regard that is necessary for defining oneself as an enterprising individual, for example, as a self-manager in competition, also conflicts with the
kind of self-depreciation issuing from general uncertainty at work. The
same opposition exists within human relationships, love as well as friendship.
Actual competition implies a double kind of affective individuation.
On the one hand, there is the necessity to show oneself off to best advant9
Adorno 1973, 360.
46
Jean Robelin
age to appear a winner and support oneself in a perpetual narcissistic

self-actualisation. On the other hand, this kind of self-betterment
through competition in the labour market is impossible to replicate in relationships. The need to know feelings like love or friendship, which
could be detached from power or economic relations, would be totally
private. These two spheres are at the same time contrasting but inseparable. This last point is significant; for example, husbands or wives who
lose their jobs may also lose their spouse as well as their social and affective network.
The multiplicity of social roles generally affirms a way of offering individual freedom as it implies only a partial inclusion in social constructs.
It is now an ambiguous phenomenon because it is also a place of split. It
is, then, important to note that social roles are impersonal but at the same
time, a condition for personal development. Answering the critics that
capitalist society is alienating, Luhmann asserts that this objectivity
makes possible social relationships in which more individual characters
become full of meaning.10 But the uneasiness of human subjects is
only displaced. We struggle to be consistent but the objectivity of social
capitalist relationships forbids it: it is fashionable to be astrologo-physicists or managers who are fierce during the week and kind on Sunday.
Individuals are split. They wildly intersect rather than solidly structure numerous, contrasting and vacillating identities created through professional, religious, national, local or sexual expectations. No wonder
these individuals search for external identities to which their adherence
and allegiance are forms of submission and conformity rather than selfdefinition. These identities, then, are often contradictory. Human subjects create themselves by appropriating cultural as well as material
goods. These external identities dominate individuals cut from these resources, including symbolic resources, finally depriving the subject of internal unity. Accounting for empirical studies and testimonies, Adorno
once more underlines this link: Between conventional religious strictness
and lack of personal faith experience, as they say.11 To me it still seems
useful to remark on this combination of the conventional character of beliefs and the weakness of individual religious experience. That which we
refer to as fundamentalism, whatever its origin and aside from political
fanaticism, is a sign of a mechanical faith. An external identity sustains
this faith and is attractive to those individuals dislocated by conflicting
10 Luhmann 1982, 14.
11 Adorno 1973, 284.
47
allegiances. Numerous and contradictory attachments sabotage individuals because they cannot build or elaborate upon them in a self-creating
way. In his empirically-based works, Adorno seems to have understood
this: he emphasises on one hand the subjects inconsistency, and on the
other hand, the grounding of the subjects individual personality on constant characters.
The contemporary subject appears also torn up by real but straight
relationships, and wide but virtual relationships, which he cannot actualise. The contemporary subject is also shredded through relationships he
cannot actualise, for example those that are few but real and others
that are many but virtual. As members of a so-called global village, individuals are significantly submitted to that kind of illusion. Individuals
self-destruct because of virtual possibilities that are in fact inaccessible
and real possibilities that oppose their virtual counterparts. Those who
have taught in under-privileged neighbourhoods know that students do
not show much sense of reality: I wont accept a job unless I earn an
X euros salary. Or the guy who is desperately weak in the French language, unable to understand the difference between necessity and obligation and yet claims: I shall be a lawyer. They live a dangerous schizophrenic double-life.
But those external identities and the constancy of character are generally now lived out as destinies. The phenomenon connects with the
steady loss of possibilities in present-day society. You are born in the
dirt; you stay in the dirt. Individuals dive into constraining external identities, the kind Communitarianism seems to sustain, because they cannot
detach themselves from those same identities. These identities shape individuals; they make them conformists by controlling the shape of
their bodies and the shape of their attitudes. Let us consider the jogging
executive who has to demonstrate a performing self-image to appear efficient. Or, we can look at the smooth hypocrisy of ecclesiastical attitudes,
which is a way of marking bodies.
Specifically in his monograph about Goethe, Georg Simmel distinguishes between the common man without any centre and the eminent
man with an able and strong personality. He considers the brutality of
big cities and competition as causes for the loss of coherent selfhood:
Finally, this deficiency in the centre of the soul leads us to look for perpetually new momentary satisfaction in impulses, sensations, and external activities; it includes us at the same time in an inconsistency and in a chaotic
helplessness, which reveal themselves, sometimes as the commotion of the
big cities, sometimes as the wild hunting of competition, sometimes as the
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Jean Robelin
specifically modern inauthenticity in the sphere of taste, of style, of opinions, of relationships.12
In fact, centred individuals do not exist anymore. The eminent man is

dead. The self-referential relationship to oneself is no more self-reflective
or self-aware. It is a way of reflecting the unreflective return of the perpetual cycle of capitalist accumulation, constantly renewing to reappear
through the kaleidoscopic desires of individuals. Hegel would say it is
a figure of the bad Infinite. To me, Simmel makes an error when he confuses strong personality with centred personality. There are strong but
conflicted personalities. I will say this another way: contemporary capitalism and its indefinite cycle of financial fluctuation dismiss the traditional
subject. Objective uncertainty emerges as a broken kind of socialisation
that exposes itself through broken representations of the self.
This off-centre subject does not exist anymore except as a fictitious
narrative of itself, the only possible unity of the fragmented self. This narrative is the fictitious unity of an individual constructed as a virtual subject by the way he describes himself. The politician exists neither by his
programme, which is a fairy tale, nor in his acts, rolled around by political uncertainties, but by the way he projects himself on television. But
this kind of story-telling also applies to organisations and corporations
that present themselves as fictitious subjects in a great self-narrative
and self-description. The irrationality of capitalism conceals the way it
motivates human subjects to obtain their attachments. Self-narrative is
a part of that search. The consequence is a kind of semantic carnival, a
fairy tale, and an enterprising story, in which to get fired means to obtain
new impetus.
These phenomena imply a contradictory relation to temporality endowed with conflicting properties. An enterprising self supposes the subject is able to project himself into the future. He must have a plan defining what he wants to do. Economic precariousness means that he is in fact
unable to project himself into the future. He lives day-by-day. Workers
struggle to be the managers of their lives, their own coaches and this is
the meaning of their project. Lessenich shows that self-care is nothing
but a way to mobilise and be flexible, constructed as a set of social values
for the employed. It is a kind of socialisation sustained by the active welfare state and a way of putting social pressure onto individuals.13 Mobility
12 Simmel 1989, 675.
13 Drre et al. 2009, 163.
49
is good in itself because it reflects the fluidity of capital. In these conditions, the affected autonomy of the individual becomes totally constrained. The so-called self-manager is only a subsidiary junior. Workers interviews prove this. They are perpetually saying: We are nothing at all, we
are disposable, we feel as if we were always too expensive.
Sickness or suicide at work appears to be a narrative of the internal
crack within human subjects. Nervous collapse is not only a fear of
being unable to sustain the rhythm; it is also an indication of guilt,
which opposes the requirement to project oneself into the future. Fearing
uncertainty and feeling guilty prevent subjects from taking chances and
consequently opposing the so-called management of innovation. The traditional welfare state made its citizens sovereign, and this way of life
mediated between economic requirements and social conflicts. Individuals who work to adapt themselves by internalising the demands of management resist this arrangement. To live means, then, to be constantly
accountable, to be guilty and to have debt.
The human subject who fragments in the face of these contradictions
is a person with suicidal tendencies. That is the real meaning of the surge
of workplace suicides in France. But one thing plays a special role in this
phenomenon: the solidarity of the working collective is broken. We asked
about what kind of unity a subject could have when exposed to these contradictions. We find this answer: a relational unity grounded upon the
construct of a collective against loneliness. This unity will be a narrative
of cooperation opposed to the self-narrative of competitive self-managers.
And this is the way in which deconstructed subjects experience the possibility of their own reconstruction.
Studying the railwaymen of a Parisian station, Yves Clot has shown
how the conductors, although they are alone in their railway carriage,
elaborate a style of acting, which is at the same time a discourse addressed
to their fellows, a way of defining their jobs and the public office of
which they are in charge. The fanatic of timetables does not slow
down except at the last minute, for he wants to save precious time and
to avoid being late. Others want to make the travellers comfortable.
The way of driving is a social language, even if the lonely conductor
does not address anybody. It is a social style of acting, even if that style
is also personal and is grounded on personal impulses. The different styles
of teachers would be illuminating in this regard. Eagle-eyed, authoritarian, intimidating teachers consider their job to consist in making pupils
learn their stuff willy-nilly. They consider the well-being of the little ones
of no concern. The smooth educator pretends he will not punish the pu-
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Jean Robelin
pils, even if they refuse to work. The personal history of kind of educator
gives rise to his or her own social language.
This rhetoric of action is the way in which social relationships reproduce themselves in the individualisation of human subjects. Two processes are linked. Rhetoric is the answer to social requirements and represents
an endeavour to give a minimalist integrative consistency to those relationships and to the habits which constitute them as a form of inter-individuality. This rhetoric also keeps the opposite tendencies of those habits and social ideologies together according to the way they imply passivity and conformity in human subjects along with the resultant impulses
to act. For example, this rhetoric holds together the ordered tasks with
the real achieved labour, the required methods with individual enterprise.
We know that workers try to give a personal touch to their workstation,
even their bench. It appears that they try to recover individuality in creating forms of inter-individuality. For example, they create their own vocabulary, naming engines, tools and so on, with their own words. This is
true even in motorway service areas. At French McDonalds restaurants,
you cannot be a member of the team if you do not accept their exclusive
vocabulary, the turns of phrase which identify McDonalds workers.
This rhetoric is then the specific answer of the workers to a contradictory social demand: managers require that workers constantly adapt
to new conditions of working and yet remain perfectly passive in their
attitude to the corporation. Flexibility means at the same time dependence on capitalism, while autonomy means pliability in response to social
conditions. At the heart of actual production, we find a core contradiction: creating a versatile and multipurpose individual through uncertainty.
We have seen that this rhetoric defines even the nature of work. It
proposes a kind of cooperation that is, at least implicitly, supposed to
be good. It makes a link between normative and cognitive expectations.
Society presupposes a kind of common good, where cooperation itself
opens possibilities for action and relationships, thus is a form of freedom.
Individuality appears to be a fundamental problem for the social sciences today. Capitalist corporations throw workers into a mortal competition, inject market disorders into the process of production, pretend to
distinguish workers according to individual worth, though productivity is
a social character, and so labour can be realised only through the individualisation of its actors. But the actual way of managing the work processes makes workers feel uncertain, places them in a precarious position,
reduces their culture to a simple implementation of proceedings, places
51
them in a short temporality without memory, and consequently obliterates their individuality. Social agents try as far as they can to reconstruct it
by renewing forms of inter-individuality and by creating a common good
that implies ways of cooperating. They are themselves human subjects
who constantly construct and deconstruct themselves, creating a partial,
always threatened unity. This is why deconstructive thinking continues
to have something to tell us.
Beyond the Eclipse of Reason:

On the Reconstruction of Rationality
Graziano Lingua
What task has the passage into the new millennium bequeathed to a European philosophy that intends to understand its own time in thought
and that does not wish to remain indifferent to social and political dynamics? Without attributing excessive significance to a date that simply
marks the progression of the calendar and not an epochal change, it is
still true that, the further we get from that date, the clearer it becomes
which aspects of last centurys sensibility no longer belong to us and
what, instead, may still be a living and fertile inheritance.
To begin with, it becomes clearer which cultural dynamics characterised the thought of an age marked by the effort to distance itself from the
project of modern reason, in order to comprehend not only its potential,
but also its fatal limits and errors. The main events that characterise the
first half of the 20th century, with its two World Wars and the experience
of totalitarianism, put the crisis of the modern project firmly on the horizon, a crisis already under way by the end of the 19th century, with
Marxs analysis of capitalist production and the Nietzschean discovery
of the nexus between reason and the relationships of domination between
the subject and society. The material and spiritual tendencies of this crisis
can be filed under many labels: the disenchantment of the world (Max
Weber), the uneasiness of civilisation (Sigmund Freud), the decline of
the West (Oswald Spengler), the crisis of European humanity (Edmund
Husserl), all expressions that seek to give voice to discontent in their appeal to a cultural and social model that has proven unable to keep its ambitious promises.
At the forefront of the inexorable hiatus between the hope for social
justice, autonomy and individual freedom, and the reality of a society in
which the effects of rationality dominate to a perverse degree, a destructive pathos begins to emerge, as if the only option left for thought is to
depart, leaving behind something not only inadequate, but also dangerously violent and illusory. After Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Stalinisms
mass exterminations, what is shattered are not just the grand narratives
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Graziano Lingua
of the philosophical and religious tradition, but even the very foundational framework of rights as instruments through which justice can prevail. On the one hand, these events seem to confirm diagnoses of the end
of metaphysics and the victory of nihilism; on the other hand, they substantiate analyses of the triumph of technique, instrumental thought and
the reification of consciousness, anticipated by Max Weber and Martin
Heidegger and significantly re-explored in The Dialectic of Enlightenment
by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, a book that non-coincidentally was published in 1947, a time in which the concrete effects of
the crisis of modern reason had been felt at full strength.
At that time, speaking about the dialectic of enlightenment entailed
the impossibility of separating the ideal plan of the Aufklrung from
the ways in which it took shape in events which the West both crafted
and suffered; and therefore also entailed that modern reason already possessed, in nuce, a grasp of the origins of its own crisis and its reversal into
the realm of violence. Nevertheless, it must be recalled that The Dialectic
of Enlightenment was born of a philosophical gesture already motivated by
an emancipatory hope, subsequently diminished through the radicalisation of criticism and the consciousness of the irreversibility of its failure.
It would be through the subsequent events of the Second World War that
suspicion and demystification produced an increasing mistrust of every
attempt at an adequate philosophical response, but also a deepened scepticism towards the very possibility that reason could render itself a governmental instrument for controlling social complexity and a motivator
for individual and collective action. From this point of view, the postwar
period seems to confirm the most negative analyses offered in the first
half of the century by Weber and Heidegger. The increasingly marked extension of instrumental and technological rationality would accentuate
scepticism concerning the possibility that a mode of thought might
arise that was capable of meeting both the individuals and societys demands for meaning, as well as reining in the systemic dominion of the
reign of technique.1 To all this can be added the polytheistic outbreak
of increasingly multicultural values and connotations, typical of the society of the last decades of the 20th century. This exposes philosophy to a
constant oscillation between, on the one hand, capitulation to relativism
and irrationalist impulses, and on the other hand simplistic attempts to
return to models prior to the crisis.
1
Cf. Ferry 1996, 85.
Beyond the Eclipse of Reason: On the Reconstruction of Rationality
55
It is not difficult, however, to perceive in the 1970s the moment in

which the destructive dimension of the critique of modern reason became
sharpened and in which the inheritance of a philosopher such as Heidegger was put to use in its capacity for a more radical unmasking of the pretensions of the modern plan. From this point of view, the philosophies of
Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty are emblematic, along with the
French post-structuralist thought of authors such as Michel Foucault
and Gilles Deleuze. In this context the prolongation of Heideggerian hermeneutics becomes radicalised in a demystificatory gesture: not the
slightest residue of sense escapes the corrosive critique of language bequeathed by these thinkers and not a single argumentative gambit can
sustain the search for a truth that goes beyond a poetic/metaphorical declaration. As Gianni Vattimo remarked about Derrida, philosophy becomes free of every founding gesture, but to do so it increasingly resembles a performance, the effect of which is not easily distinguished from
that of an aesthetic experience.2
From this point of view, the in the general sense deconstructive
sensibility can be seen as the extreme effect of a distancing of the modern
project and thus effectively becomes one of the terms on which the legitimacy of the radical critique of reason is assessed. Yet is there truly nothing
left over once reason has undergone this process of radical dissemination?
Must we accept that it has been deformed by an intrinsically deceptive
and violent totalitarian dimension, and must therefore be considered a
repressive tool, to be distrusted? If one examines what has occurred in
philosophical debate over the last two decades of the 20th century, it
would seem that the answer is no. Rather, the last stage of transition
from the 1900s bequeaths to the new millennium an evident inclination
to move away from a purely destructive criticism and underlines an attitude that we could define as reconstructive, that is, characterised by a
positive need to reconstruct rationality on a new basis, recognising the
legitimacy of appeals to truth on behalf of philosophical discourse,
such as might justify a rational critique of language and thought. This
counter-tendency to the kind of radical demystification involved in the
idea of a total eclipse of reason is registered in all those forms of thought
that do not give up all claims to truth and which seek out the positive
conditions of a non-metaphysical deployment of modern reason extending to its ethical and social aspects. The signs of this are also often found
outside the realm of strictly academic reflection. They underline a precise
2
Vattimo 1997, 101.
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demand for standards of validity in public discourse and social action that
cannot be limited to the aesthetic and paradoxical postures to which deconstruction has accustomed us. It is, moreover, against the impolitic effects of these postures that risk legitimising diffuse forms of cynicism and
irresponsibility,3 that the need for a new positive-critical responsibility for
thought has become more evident.
However, there is need to reach agreement on the meaning of this reconstructive attitude and on the use of the term reconstruction because
it can, as with deconstruction, become simply an empty slogan, devoid
of genuine meaning. Thus, rather than a precise philosophical category,
by reconstruction I mean here a widely shared sensibility that can be perceived on many levels and be spoken in many ways. Recognising this indeterminacy, which makes it difficult to offer a precise map of authors
and a consolidated topography of subject-areas, in the following pages
I will begin by proposing a hypothesis for reading this sensibility, by covering the thought of three exponents of continental philosophy, Jrgen
Habermas, Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Marc Ferry, seeking to thematise,
from each point of view, the reconfiguration of rationality. I will use
some of their fundamental intuitions as a terrain of philosophical experimentation for the concept of reconstruction, without pretending to offer
an exhaustive historiography. My goal, rather, is to show that the reconfiguration of rationality cannot consist in a regressive attitude to the crisis
of reason, in a simple return to the past, avoiding exposure to more radical forms of deconstruction, but must instead pursue to the end the demystifying dimension intrinsic to the philosophies of crisis, without limiting itself to their deconstructive side. Through these three thinkers, I
will try to demonstrate that the philosophical use of the notion of reconstruction, and specifically the reconstruction of rationality, is legitimate
only if it succeeds in bringing to light reconstructive resources present
within the demystificatory critique; resources that become essential to answering to paraphrase Ricoeurs famous formula the question whether
modern reasons project is still capable of giving rise to thought.
Cf. Putnam 1992, 132 133; Ferraris 2010.
57
1. The communicative reconstruction of rationality:

Jrgen Habermas
Habermas is undoubtedly one of those European authors who best express this spirit of a rehabilitation of reason, against the diagnosis of
the death of rationality. His position is in favour of a reconstruction of
the modern plan of rationality, against the various formulations that
are programmatically defined as postmodern, yet it is not opposed to
the idea of a crisis of reason. Indeed, his belonging to the Frankfurt
School means that Habermas is deeply conscious of the problem posed
by Horkheimer and Adorno in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. In Habermass philosophy one finds an alternative research route to those of the
philosophies that limit themselves to denouncing the crisis of Western rationalism, the triumph of the instrumental spirit and the distortions of
public communication. As one can read in an essay of 1970, according
to Habermas, every critique demystifying communication must presuppose that there exists, at least ideally, a form of communication that
has not been degraded,4 that can therefore make use of a non-mystificatory critique. For the analysis of the deformed structures of communication to be possible, it is therefore necessary to presuppose a form of intact
communication which can be offered as an ethical ideal of humanity, the
ideal of a community of communication free from any kind of domination. It is therefore not true that all rationality is totalitarian, or that its
instrumental use is the only possibility, since an alternative exists which
Habermas, following Apel, identifies with a discursive-procedural
model of rationality whose objective is the cooperative construction of
understanding via argumentative discussion.
From the outset, one can see that the goal of this discursive model of
rationality consists in reconstructing the conditions that render successful
communication possible, and thus offer an exercise of reason that does
not have to be illusory or the product of false consciousness. Habermas
does not simply aim to revive reason from outside through a sense of
commitment to its validity, and nor does he propose a metaphysical substantialism, or simply re-assume a philosophy of the subject. Rather, he
deems it necessary to recognise and make explicit that which is implicit
in every critical act of speech that seeks validity and that in order to legitimate its own validity, passes through an intersubjective procedure of
4
Habermas 1970, 360 375. On this aspect, see Cunico 2009, 24.
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Graziano Lingua
validation. He who sets up to take part in this discussion must already

presuppose a series of conditions that render it possible: a practical discourse is inconceivable without postulating that the protagonists themselves adhere to the norms they have recognised if they expect their
speech to be valid. This evidently entails a strong dose of idealisation:
such a communicative reason founds its validity on a series of postulates
(openness of access, equal freedom of speech, absence of external constrictions, sincerity of interlocutors, etc.) which are inevitably counter-factual
because they do not occur in ordinary communication, in which distortions of various kinds operate.5
Now, the utopianism of this ideal speech situation is one of the elements most strongly condemned by critics,6 since the Habermasian reconstruction would seem ultimately to presuppose an unreal form of
communication, devoid of effect in social practice. Habermas is aware
that the existing concrete form of the argument does not satisfy these presupposed conditions, and on this basis recognises the counter-factuality of
the argument; however he judges it necessary in order to render the confrontation possible and in order to create the conditions for understanding. Actually, as Ferry makes clear,7 the validity of these idealisations cannot be refuted on the basis of existing empirical limits to communication,
because its function is regulative and indicates the intrinsic normativity of
communicative action. This intrinsic normative quality emerges clearly
from the 1980s onwards when Habermas, starting from the theory of
communicative rationality, starts to elaborate his discourse ethics
(Diskursethik).8 In this case, too, the reconstructive instance coincides
with the necessity to recognise specific normative ties9 that must be presupposed on the part of every social actor who intends to reason, and who
cannot deny them without falling into a pragmatic self-contradiction.
5
6
7
8
9
Cf. for example Habermas 1979, 1 68. On this aspect of Habermass thought,
see Lafont 1999, 141 f.
For a picture of the critiques against the Habermasian position, see Benhabib
1995, 330 339.
Ferry 2010, 148.
See Habermas 1990a; Habermas 1993.
These normative ties are declined in the principle of universalisation (U) according to which moral norms must have the form of universal unconditional
propositions founded upon universal interests and in the principle of discussion
(D) that requires a basis of validity to every norm acting on a consensus obtained through argumentation. Cf. Habermas 1990a, 120 f. For an analysis of
these principles, see Ingram 2010, 131 138.
59
To me it seems that the most productive kind of criticism is that

which focuses on the Habermasian thesis that argumentation is the
only register of discursive validity.10 Regarding both epistemology and
moral issues, Habermas opts for a procedure in which the only resource
of intersubjective validation is the rational force of argument. In the argumentation a non-coercive cogency of the better argument must prevail,
that is, the argument that best succeeds in generating consent from others.11 This option becomes particularly problematic from the practical
point of view, when it is not just issues of fact that are involved, but
also values and convictions less easily translatable into argumentative
terms which nevertheless strongly condition the positions taken by various protagonists in a discussion. To focus, as with Diskursethik, the cooperative construction of norms on the single register of argumentation risks
producing a restrictive effect on discussion. This is because it excludes,
from the formation of understanding, the social actors, who are inadequate at the level of rational-discursive logic, but all the same able, as Giacomo Marramao says, to give an account of their own chosen ethics or
the consequences the autonomous or heteronomous adoption of determined norms and styles of life involve in their existence.12
A tension is generated therefore that risks compromising from within
the inclusivity of communicative reason. On the one hand, it means remaining receptive to every form of speech on the condition that the normative presuppositions for acting and for understanding are recognised.
But, on the other hand, the restriction of the criteria of validity to the
argumentative register alone has the effect of making it difficult to integrate deeper motives into the discussion, such as individual biographies
and contexts of belonging, that can often only be expressed by informal
registers, as happens for example in moral doctrines of a religious character. The attempt by Habermas in his most recent work to open communicative reason to the contributions of religion demonstrates this internal
tension in his thought.13 On the one hand, Habermas recognises the necessity to transcend positions like that of Rawlsian liberalism that imply
an exclusion of religious doctrines from the public debate in which the
political will is formed. Yet on the other hand, he demands that the some10
11
12
13
See for example Ferry 1996, 86 104.

Habermas 1984, 25.
Marramao 2008, 82.
On the role of religion in the late Habermas, see Cunico 2010; Lafont 2007,
239 259.
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how mythical-symbolic content of religions be translated into a secular

language accessible to all. The institutional translation proviso14 required
by Habermas, then, involves a process of rationalisation which demythologises these contents, that is, a secularising transposition of the particular convictions into a universal reason. Now, this transposition is not
without its own problems, since either one immediately acknowledges
that citizens who are also religious believers are able to express their convictions in a language that is accessible to everybody (and therefore recognises a form of rationality even within the symbolic resources of the
religions concerned) or it becomes unclear how thanks to the cooperative contribution of secularised citizens a private conviction might become universalisable where previously it was not.15
2. Beyond demystification: Paul Ricoeur

The tension present in late Habermas shows how his proposal though it
has unquestionably constituted a barrier against the deconstructionist
vogue contains at its core a residue of rationalism. It is a form of rationalism which has the appearance of an excessive optimism towards the
emancipatory force of communication, and which ends by espousing a
much less inclusive rationality than what Habermas himself would
have liked. This limitation becomes still more obvious if a series of thematic constellations that in the last two decades has acquired importance
in philosophical debate is considered. It seems to recall the demand for a
reason principally attentive to concrete contexts and the extra-argumentative elements that contribute to constructing real identities and motivate the life of social actors. One might think, for example, of the ambiguous phenomenon of the return of the religious16 that seems to put in
doubt the irreversibility of the process of secularisation and alludes to a
renewed need for symbolic resources, or the growing attention to the individual and collective convictions which refer more to intuitive values
than to reasoned arguments.17 Or again, the re-emergence of the problem
14 Habermas 2006b, 10.
15 On this topic, I permit myself to refer the reader to Lingua 2010, 20 27.
16 For a sociological analysis of the phenomenon, cf. Casanova 1994; Norris/Inglehart 2004. For an interesting synthesis of these philosophical aspects, see Tosel
2011. While on the contemporary aspects of secularisation one must not overlook Taylor 2007.
17 For instance, cf. Joas 2000.
61
of myth, interpreted not only as content to be rationalised but as an authentic form for the transmission of meaning at the social level and as a
source of normativity.18 These themes, then, find their centre of gravity in
the philosophical interest in narrative as a discursive register more closely
bound up with the history of existence and less with abstract argumentation.19
Paul Ricoeur is without doubt one of those contemporary authors
who best display a sensibility towards the recovery of the philosophical
dignity of these expressive and identificatory dimensions, as well as an attention to the veritative and normative force of history. His hermeneutics
represents a particularly interesting contribution that helps to clarify what
I have termed the reconstructive sensibility, because the valorisation of
the symbolic order that it proposes assumes from its outset the demystifying critique, yet without being limited to that negative dimension. In
his works from the 1960s, Ricoeur approaches interpretation as an exercise of unmasking those he termed, in a felicitous phrase, the masters of
suspicion, by applying a different hermeneutics, founded on the recollection of meaning,20 that is, on a movement towards a reconstitution
of meaning. This dualism returns in the form of various binaries that always recalls the need to avoid reducing the relationship with symbolic
material to a simple negative genealogy: think, for instance, of the difference between reductive hermeneutics and restorative hermeneutics, or
of the difference between demythization and demythologization.21 The
idea of restoration and of demythologisation recall the fact that, it is beyond destruction that the question is posed as to what thought, reason
and even faith still signify.22
However, going beyond destruction does not mean choosing one of
the two poles of the binary and cancelling out the other. Rather it
means seeking to keep them in constant dialectical relation. The philosophies of suspicion do an important job on symbolic material because
mythos, or narrative, has always been a means of masking or dissimulating
origins, a technique by which language says indirectly what cannot be
18 For instance, cf. Legendre 1999.
19 Think, for instance, of the role played by narration, not only in Ricoeurs
thought, but also as analysed by authors such as Charles Taylor (1989) and Alasdair MacIntyre (1984). For an introduction to the meaning of the rebirth of interest in narrative, see Rankin 2002, 1 12.
20 See Ricoeur 1970, 28 32.
21 See Ricoeur 1970, 530; Ricoeur 1989, 185, 326 330, 332 f.
22 Ricoeur 1970, 43.
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said directly. Yet these approaches do not take the subsequent steps of
rearticulating and re-semanticising the demystified contents.23 It is this
second aspect that defines the innovation of the Ricoeurian gesture,
and that can inspire what Hans Joas called affirmative genealogy,24
thanks to which the archaeological search into symbolic elements does
not result merely in an unmasking of the illusions and a consequent disenchantment or demystification, but the possibility of opening itself to
the various levels of meaning that are archived in the language of symbolic-narrative.
The same reconstructive dynamics is also found in Ricoeurs later
thought, when starting with Oneself as Another he explores the effect
that the recovery of the narrated layers of existence has on ethico-political
aspects. For Ricoeur during this period, narration is more directly articulated towards the topic of action and the issue of its moral justification.
Once a story enters into the exchange of experiences and intersubjective
communication, it is no longer free from being approved or being disapproved, since it is imputable to a person who acts. Linking stories to subject-agents means that mythos does not enjoy an ethical neutrality.25 Every
narration tells of an action and an actor that make choices that are exposed to appraisal and which therefore trigger a process of blame or justification. This is why in Oneself as Another narration acts as the hinge
between the moment of description, as a discourse concerning the factuality of events, and the moment of prescription, that is, the attribution to a
lived personage of this event and the responsibility it entails.26 Ricoeur
thus arrives indirectly at a recovery of the subject, without evading the
critique and the suspicion that had transformed it into a shattered cogito
and without simply restoring a philosophy of the exalted subject.27 Rather this approach institutes a register of multiple and many-levelled sense,
the matrix for which resides in the ability of narrative identity to be at the
same time a construction of the continuity of vital ties and the place
where their validity is judged. It is at this level that the Ricoeurian anthropological reflection becomes explicitly political and that the reconstructive requirement as affirmative genealogy meets the intersubjective
23 I am indebted to the work of Alberto Martinengo for these observations on the
reconstructive dimension of dialectic between Ricoeurs hermeneutics, cf. Martinengo 2008b, 43 50.
24 Joas 2009, 15 24.
25 Cf. Ricoeur 1992, 115.
26 Ricoeur 1992, 152 f.; on these aspects, see Ferry 1994, 60 f.
27 Ricoeur 1992, 11 f.
63
place of justification and validation. Emblematic of this is another conceptual coupling which lends its title to the volume of interviews Critique
and Conviction and that resurfaces in other works in the polarity between
reasoning and conviction.28 Instead of identifying argumentation alone as
the instrument of normative justification as Habermas does, Ricoeur proposes to enact a subtle dialectic between argumentation and conviction,
according to which only their co-implication or inter-involvement can
permit them to make a responsive moral judgment upon concrete situations. And this precisely because argumentation is not simply posited as
the antagonist of tradition and convention, but as the critical agency operating at the heart of conviction, argumentation assuming the task not of
eliminating, but of carrying them to the level of considered convictions.29
The valorisation of the symbolic as a form not external but internal to
rationality now becomes due to the ethico-political turn of Ricoeurian
thought that occurred in the 1990s the rehabilitation of contexts in
which identity and conviction mature. With respect to these contexts
the argumentation is, however, above all an abstract segment30 of a discursive plural proceeding through which various linguistic games acquire
value, games which contribute to forming the positions from which the
same arguments themselves acquire value. It is here, then, that the restorative hermeneutics is enriched with new significance: it is no longer only
an affirmative genealogy that contrasts with the negative orientation of
the masters of suspicion, but rather becomes a wider articulation between
genealogy and justification, between narration and discursive validation,
in which a subtle dialectic works between the narrative genesis of individual and collective identities and their critical justification.
3. Validity of the argument and vulnerability of the person:

The reconstructive principle according to Jean-Marc Ferry
As befits his case for the necessity of re-articulating narration and reasoning, and thereby recovering the validity of the discursive register expressed, Ricoeurs reflection finds an unexpected consonance with some
28 Ricoeur 1991, 161 f.
29 Ricoeur 1992, 288.
30 Ricoeur 1992, 287.
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followers of the Habermasian program.31 Among these it is worth taking

a look at the third figure who interests us here. I refer to the philosophical
project of Jean-Marc Ferry, since it makes of reconstruction a programmatic notion whose objective is to value the complementary relation between the historical-contextual resources of narrative and the universalising requirement of argumentation, as fundamental elements of rationality. Its reconstructive ethics,32 while maintaining the procedural system
of Diskursethik, points towards a specific acknowledgment of the individual persons involved, with their particular history that, though often difficult to translate precisely into terms of rational argumentation, nevertheless conditions and structures the concrete positions taken in an argument. The philosophy of Ferry therefore links up with the critical angle
of the Frankfurt tradition, with attention paid to the contextual aspects,
the role of convictions and the symbolic horizons of hermeneutic enquiry.
This lends to reconstruction a strong theoretical capacity, as a notion
that not only describes contemporary sensibility, but can also constitute
the blueprint of a plan to redefine and to extend public reason.
Against the idea that argumentation constitutes the only modality of
discursive validation, Ferry proposes in Les puissances de lexprience a systematic plurality of forms of speech based on four registers narration,
interpretation, argumentation and reconstruction each with a specific
level of reflexivity and a distinct normative capacity.33 With these classifications Ferry does not aim to distinguish diverse genres or formal styles:
the discrimination that organises the partition into four categories is in
fact pragmatic. It is rooted in the various types of discursive action that
are put into play and is able to evidence the variety of elements that is
working behind and within the communicative construction of identities.
This same conception of a plural system of discursive registers means that
none of them can claim exclusive priority, or supremacy as the locus of
validity. Rather they all contribute in various ways to communicative rationality. This is valid not only for the register of argumentation which,
as we have seen, represents for Habermas the prime register for the justification through which interlocutors might be persuaded to reach consensus but also for the narrative dimension to which Ricoeurian hermeneutics, and with it many contemporary speech-act theories, attribute su31 I am thinking of several authors such as Seyla Benhabib, Jean-Marc Ferry and
Albrecht Wellmer. Cf. Benhabib 1986, 338 339; Ferry 1996; Wellmer 1991.
32 Cf. Ferry 1996.
33 Cf. Ferry 1991a, 103 157.
65
premacy in the construction of identity and a near-monopoly of the substantial issues.34 Ferry thinks that Ricoeur overrates the capacity of the
narrative dimension and does not recognise that narration as a discursive
register suffers from a logical and normative deficit.35 The moment of reconstruction, as the fourth moment of the system, has but one strategic
function: being a register of speech in and of itself, it also represents a
moment to resume reflection and an opportunity for integration of the
previous registers, without being sutured exclusively to any of those particular registers. It allows for a shift in the focus of the narrative by structuring them through reasoning,36 serving to correct the superimposition
that occurs on the narrative level between res factae and res fictae, therefore being able to contextualise not only the sense of a story, but also its
claims to truth. If it does not come to maturity reflectively through a critical thematisation of the narrative element of identity, it lends itself rather
to processes of ideological auto-justification; thus it is necessary that it
decentres itself in more reflective and critical forms that check the tendency towards an idiosyncratic closure.37
But why does Ferry call reconstruction the fourth register? Certainly
the term refers to a retrospective movement of reflective mediation different from the gesture of deconstruction, even if in Ferrys work there is no
direct comparison with deconstruction. The notion of reconstruction,
however, should not be read in direct opposition to deconstruction,
but rather in relation to the need to break with the formal restrictions
and delimitations that are abstract and hardly sensitive to the historical
nature of reasoning. Thus, it is necessary to emphasise that reconstruction
is not simply reactive and it does not allude to a return to irretrievably
lost identities, as if resorting to some tradition that could prevail as
such, but works on concrete forms in which are manifested the requirements of a universality of reason. A twofold movement of rationality operates that on the one hand is critico-demystifying in its encounters with
every form of dogmatic hypostatisation, comprising the violent forms of
argumentative reason, and on the other hand is reconstructive-restitutive,
as by recovering the more expressive forms of speech it thematises the
need for justification.38 It therefore does not propose taking a retrograde
34
35
36
37
38
Ferry 1991b, 103.

Cf. Ferry 1994, 59 70.
Ferry 1996, 55 56.
Ferry 1996, 43 45.
Ferry 1991b, 138.
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step regarding modern critical thought, but rather a step forward, implementing and expanding rationality, so as to render it sensitive to a series
of elements that modernity has neglected.
This reconstructed dimension becomes evident in the ethico-political
reflection that Ferry declines to depart from in his theory of discursive
registers.39 In reconstructive ethics a central role is given to the experience of the other and the suffering that may concretely impede intersubjective communication, for which purpose the discussion goes beyond the
strictly argumentative style at the basis of rationality to recognise the need
for a reconciliation of memory and the recognition of the person. On the
ethical side, reconstruction therefore demands a deepening of the requirement for a justification that is not limited to rational validity but is in a
position to integrate an acknowledgment of the vulnerability of the subjects involved and of the particular history of which they are bearers. Reconstructive ethics at the same time thus becomes an ethics of recognition
of the others vulnerability, and an ethics of responsibility in the interests
of justice and truth cooperatively sought out, without any one of the interlocutors being in prior possession of the key that leads to consensus.
One of the more significant aspects that reconstructive sensibility acquires in Ferry, is its ability to articulate the genesis and justification of
validity. From this point of view, reconstruction does not mean merely
re-tracing and ordering the historical elements that contribute to identifying the values and the convictions sustained by all, but also implies a
critical reconstruction of the origins of these values, helping to overcome
the different kinds of violence that may have generated a lack of acknowledgment of the persons involved. The genealogical moment must make
reference to criteria of validity, but such criteria cannot be founded on
decontextualised a priori claims; they must emerge reflectively in the
same experience of communication. For this to happen, critical charity40
is necessary, that is, an attitude of real openness in comparing the symbolic forms in which beliefs belonging to other sensibilities or cultures are
expressed; this openness is the only attitude that can encourage the emergence of that spontaneous ethical attitude of mutual acknowledgment.
39 Cf. Ferry 1996; Ferry 2000; Ferry 2010.

40 Ferry 2004, 204.
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4. Conclusion
As one can see from the course I have followed, from Habermass rehabilitation of reason, passing through Ricoeurs hermeneutics, to the articulation between genesis and validity which leads to Ferrys systematising
of public discourses, a philosophical analysis of reconstruction demands
the recognition of the plurality of this notion. All the more so when
the issue at hand is that of the contemporary reconstruction of reason.
There is, however, a common element worth remembering in conclusion,
and related to what has already been said about the necessity of thinking
of reconstructive sensibility not only in regressive terms, as a simple strategy of turning backwards. It can be summarised as the necessity of not
interpreting the expression reconstruction of rationality by giving the
genitive a purely objective meaning. The issue at stake in the authors I
have examined as a terrain of philosophical experimentation is not rehabilitating reason from outside, for in this case every reconstruction would
become a simple restoration. The true challenge is instead the subjectivegenitive sense of that expression: it is the same rationality that from within is called upon to reconstruct itself, that is, to rearticulate itself by taking the process to its logical conclusion in accordance with the destructive
critique while recognising, however, that destruction is not the only form
of contemporary philosophy that can undertake the task at hand.
Translated by Mike Watson
Towards a Reconstructive Critique

of Historical Reason
Jean-Marc Ferry
As a direct heritage of the humanism of the Enlightenment, the concept
of historical reason is, for us, intimately linked to the modern idea of a
universal history. This concept realises the scope of reason in the world
as it progresses toward a potentially limitless development in the fields
of knowledge and human liberty. It is essential to contextualise the
birth of historical reason in order to understand the changes that brought
it to a moment of crisis at the beginning of the 19th century. The romanticism of Schlegel, the aestheticism of Humboldt,1 the vitalism of Rickert, and the historicism of Dilthey2 anticipated the contemporary,
and not only the German, movements of culturalism and structuralism
in a critique that culminates in the crisis of historical reason. This critique
was then radicalised in the 20th century in the form of a veritable destruction which, philosophically speaking, linked up readily with the Heideggerian project of the destruction of Western metaphysics.
As is well known, this means that today we do not feel authorised to
postulate a rationality within history. Neither do we consider universal
history as a rational process, even less as a reasonable process, and for reasons that are not only ontological or epistemological, but also ethical and
political. Among the non-theoretical motives for dismissing historical reason, first and foremost is the horrific moral, political, and even cosmological experience of the 20th century. The experience of this catastrophe,
which can hardly be expressed in words, abruptly refuted the illusion
of a reason within history, of a history that necessarily ought to have realised reason. With respect to the catastrophe, those who, like Adorno
and Horkheimer,3 maintained the Hegelian dialectic of the reason of history, inverted the optimistic or providential schema by showing the fundamental irrationality at work in the dialectic of Enlightenment.
1
2
3
Humboldt 1988.
Dilthey 2002.
Horkheimer/Adorno 2002.
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Jean-Marc Ferry
Drawing on this problematic, the critique of historical reason returns

to affirm the separation between logic and reason. As Horkheimer argues
in The Authoritarian State, as long as world history follows its logical
course, it fails to fulfil its human destiny.4 For Horkheimer, history is
the logical process in the course of which reason betrays itself, culminating in the triumph of instrumental rationality, the end of the individual,
the reign of administered society, etc. In the development of this critique,
the inheritors of Hegel quite ironically rejoin Heidegger in their discussions of the culture of technics.
But let us return to theoretical motifs, that is, to ontological or epistemological questions, according to which it was equally necessary to
leave behind the concept of historical reason. This condition results in
a work of reflection that philosophy, as well as the social sciences broadly
understood and German humanistic studies more specifically, effectuated
over the course of the 19th century and continued into the 20th century
with hermeneutic theory and neo-historicism. After providing a survey
of the history of this concept from its inception to its destruction, I
will attempt to show in what sense a pragmatic reconstruction of historical reason can be envisaged after its hermeneutic destruction without reiterating the metaphysical project of the philosophies of history.
Historical reason: The formation of a concept

One question is at the basis of the concept of historical reason, formed as
it was at the heart of modern philosophies of history. This fundamental
question belongs to the context of the Enlightenment: How can reason
realise itself in the world, so that humanity might fulfil its potential?
At the same time, this question reintroduces the revolutionary problematic of the transition from theory to praxis, that is, to the problematic
of the becoming-positive of natural law. Either there is the imposition of
reason by force following the Jacobin model, or one can imagine a scenario that avoids political violence, locating the emergence of reason, not in
the transcendent exercise of political will, but in the immanence of the
historical process. The latter possibility brings together the rationalist philosophies of history during the revolutionary period, including Kant.
From this point of view, the immanent solution to the problem of the
4
Horkheimer 1982, 117.
Towards a Reconstructive Critique of Historical Reason
71
realisation of reason in the world can only be furnished by the pre-dialectical model of a globally rational outcome of human interactions.
This image had already appeared in Mandevilles Fable of the Bees; it
is implicit in the thought of Leibniz; it is thematised in Adam Smiths
concept of the invisible hand; it is elaborated in the political writings
of Kant as a plan of nature; and it is consecrated in Hegels philosophy
of history as the cunning of reason. The Hegelian theme of the cunning
of reason means that reason, in order to realise itself, uses its other, its
opposite (evil, madness, that which aims to negate). Further, reasons
other blindly realises the ends that reason, in its powerful lucidity, recognises as profoundly its own, even when it requires almost no effort to realise these ends, but lets reasons opposite function in its place.
And yet, if we call to mind this well known Hegelian theme, it is not
for the purpose of denouncing yet again an outdated and problematic
mode of thought (today discredited for moral as well as scientific reasons); it is rather in order to call attention to a certain number of important points that follow from it. Historical reason, strictly understood from
the perspective of the cunning of reason, fundamentally obeys a natural
logic.
Admittedly, Kant does not introduce the cunning of reason as a philosophical idea except in terms of his concept of teleology, by which nature, or mans inherent tendencies would mechanically realise the juridical preconditions for the reign of liberty. For Kant, the cunning of reason
is only conceivable from a methodological point of view, in which one
assumes that the universal laws of nature govern human actions as
much as anything else. Notably, in making this argument, he draws an
ontological distinction between nature and liberty.
This is equally true for Hegel, however, even though this aspect of
history as the cunning of reason is much more evident and fully endorsed
in Hegel than it is within the Kantian system. In contrast to Kant, the
cunning of reason designates a manner of being, for Hegel, that addresses
itself to nature but not to spirit. Initially, the category of cunning was specifically introduced in the dialectic of labour as a technique by which one
manipulates natural processes in the service of larger ends. Thereafter,
Hegel considers cunning in terms of its didactic function, using it as a
metaphor to depict reason in history. Yet the cunning of reason plays
no role in the Phenomenology of Spirit. At the very most, spirit is only subject to cunning insofar as it becomes nature (e. g. as a psychological
drive). But as a movement of conscience and self-reflection, spirit describes an entirely autonomous historical process that does not emphasise
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Jean-Marc Ferry
the cunning of reason. This is a movement of freedom, bearing itself out

in the experience of consciousness as it is continuously deepened by its
own self-reflection.
It follows that, reduced to the schema of cunning (whatever name one
gives it), historical reason in fact lacks historicity. Take, for example, the
passions, or the war of all against all: the cunning of reason allows for the
reversal of these situations, overturning the passions through reason or
anticipating an eternally peaceful world. Between this point of departure
and the future point of arrival, there is only an ahistorical, pseudo-natural
mechanics. Even if we presuppose the eventual realisation of history, this
moment cannot be called dialectical except in the most impoverished,
physicalist sense having to do with the effects of crude mechanical interaction. True historical reason, therefore, must be located outside the mechanics of cunning.
In Kants writings on history, historicity only emerges through the
natural mechanics of ego-centred drives as they progressively give way
to a veritable dialectic of social communication. For Kant, this progress
of the spirit is introduced through the category of the public sphere (ffentlichkeit).
For Fichte, notably in his Doctrine of Scientific Knowledge (Nova
Methodo), as well as in Foundations of Natural Right, the important category of Aufforderung, or the summons, which emanates from another
ego towards the auto-limitation of the self, situates the fundamental
human condition of historicity. This category of the summons not
only reveals itself in the impulse towards natural law, but even becomes
the very essence of historical reason. Thus, Fichte described our intuition
of historicity as a chain of communicative acts between separate egos.
Though Fichtes philosophical system aimed at understanding this succession in terms of causality, he indirectly revealed a logical framework, a
fleeting discovery of what we might call the illocutionary bond.
On the other hand, Hegels most developed concept of historical reason is merely hinted at towards the end of his introduction to the Lessons
on the Philosophy of History. Here, Hegel affirms that the central question
revolves around the transmission of an intersubjective national spirit, of
one Volksgeist to another. This indicates that historicity is made most explicit as an internal dimension of the philosophy of spirit. In fact, it is in
Hegels Jena lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (rather than in the Phenomenology of Spirit) that he explicates the logic of the relationship between self and other. As he makes clear, the central issue is self-referentiality, in which communication plays a fundamentally intersubjective role.
73
Thus Hegel does distinguish between a mechanical and a truly dialectical

concept of historical reason.
Among the three great metaphysical paradigms of history (nature,
freedom, and spirit), only spirit seems truly pertinent to the question
of the reason of history. And this is the crux of the matter, for the critique
of historical reason is closely tied to the scientific appropriation of this
metaphysical paradigm.
Historical reason: Critique and destruction

The critique of historical reason proceeds simultaneously from two different elements: on the one hand, the rejection of universal philosophies of
history, and on the other, a desire to establish a theoretical domain of autonomous objects for the human sciences (i. e. the Geisteswissenschaften).
First of all, as opposed to the idealist philosophies of history, the critique
of historical reason calls for the scientific and positivistic saving of the
historical phenomena. Given this, it is essential to establish a scientific
point of view about historical phenomena before we can begin to interrogate the meaning of history. This demand for a positivistic project was
welcomed in Germany at the beginning of the 19th century in Rankes
German school of history (in which, however, Droysen did not participate).5
Just as importantly, we must distinguish between the meaning of history and the end of history. In contrast to philosophies that propose an
end to history, the question of historical meaning is still paramount for
our investigation, although we must nonetheless circumscribe this question with greater care. Rather than interrogate some general meaning
of history taken in the global sense, we must instead question the meaning that emerges from delimited historical constellations. In other words,
our first step will be to evacuate the concept of universal history.
From this, a new type of epistemological consciousness is formed in
which the historical is recognised as the domain of the particular, while at
the same time universally valid general laws subsume the physical domain. Whereas physical sciences fall under the category of nomology,
historical sciences can be classified as idiographic. The particularity
that the world of social history focuses on is thus thought under the her5
Droysen 1974. For Droysen, as opposed to Ranke, the primary purpose of the
practice of history is not to establish historical facts.
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Jean-Marc Ferry
meneutic category of the individual and individualism. In other words,

the historical context in which a social or cultural phenomenon is pertinent is also the context in which this phenomenon must be grasped in its
totality.
Furthermore, culture (as a specific form of life) establishes itself as the
reference point for a science of history. When situated historically beside
other forms of life, culture makes up a totality of symbolically structured
meaning. In this manner, epistemological reflection on the Geisteswissenschaften, as Neo-Kantianism and German Historicism interpreted it, rejoins a scientific usage of the philosophical concept of the objective spirit and even of the absolute spirit. In other words, historical culture (i. e.
a singular historical world) understands itself as an objective presentation
of the spirit incarnated in the institutions, significations, and representative symbols of a given society or culture. The hermeneutic cohesiveness
of this symbolic constellation refers to the idea of a principle that characterises this historical world.
When posing the methodological question of how knowledge approaches the domain of objects, we are dealing with a symbolically
pre-structured reality. The texture of the historical world, reduced in
this way to the cultural world, is fundamentally semantic and pragmatic.
This semantic coherence cannot be explained by the mechanical model
of cause and effect, but rather must be understood through its intimate
participation in the human world of language, actions and expressions of
lived experience. This leads to a series of epistemological problems linked
to the circular nature of symbolic interpretation in the historical and social sciences.
What, for the concept of historical reason, are the ramifications of
this self-understanding of the Geisteswissenschaften? Since the object in
question is no longer universal history, but the symbolic construct of
each singular cultural world, the question of a relationship, of a possible
liaison between these worlds can no longer even be posed. From the perspective of the defunct concept of historical reason, this substitution of an
historical world for a universal history returns to dissolve the question
of history in a theory of culture. The diachronic process fades into a synchronic structure,6 and the historical worlds become cultural monads, in
which reason is no longer revealed in the historical process where events
emerge into time in their successive order. This epistemological disinte6
Cassirer 1988.
75
gration of universal history can be philosophically elaborated in the hermeneutic deconstruction of historical reason.
This is not the hermeneutic element itself, but the elevation of hermeneutics to a vision of the world that in turn consecrates the destruction
of historical reason. Exemplary in this regard is the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer.7 According to his argument, the logic
of this destruction is carried out in two stages: the critique of subjectivity
and the ontologisation of understanding.
The critique of subjectivity

The critique of subjectivity, which becomes most relevant in the consideration of Aufklrungs relationship to history, attacks the Enlightenments attitude towards tradition. Importantly, this critique claims that
one cannot submit tradition to a tribunal of reason. The systematic critique of all presumptions is the error, the central illusion of the Aufklrung, and is actually its fundamental assumption: a prejudice against prejudices in general. In effect, this critique of traditions inherited assumptions maintains the pretence that it is itself free of all such assumptions
and outside the tradition that it purports to examine. This is the Aufklrungs false conscience. Tradition and inherited language furnish precisely
that bias toward authority without which critiques truth-claims would
not even be conceivable. Furthermore, critique itself can be understood
as a form of tradition. But above all, critique cannot accomplish anything
without language and, more generally speaking, without a certain linguistic framework that pre-structures meaning, truth, and being. Thus, this
fundamental linguistic framework is the always already, where each discursive act must presuppose a meaning. The possibility of locating truth,
therefore, does not follow from subjective reflection, but rather depends
on an already-understood linguistic structure that governs our discourse
at any given moment. As we shall see, this interpretation will return to
ontologise the methodological principle of meaningful explanation developed by historicism for the Geisteswissenschaften.
See Gadamer 1969.
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Jean-Marc Ferry
The ontologisation of hermeneutic interpretation

A central idea of Gadamers hermeneutic philosophy (who in this was a
good student of Heideggers), is that all aspirations toward enworlded
truth fundamentally depend on a factual disposition toward language,
which makes possible at any given moment the articulation of propositions that put the question of meaning and truth into play. In Heideggerian terms, nothing is spoken that does not presuppose the hearing of that
which had been more originally spoken, where the essence of language
becomes speech [parole]. In languages tendency towards fact, truth is presupposed as having been spoken at any given moment, because language
always returns to an event, its origin of meaning. This epochal event governs enworlded discourse. Moreover, it is historically contingent, so that
the projected image of history has the quality of being always otherwise
understood in accordance with the game of truth and the mask of
being.
This hermeneutic vision of the world rests on theories that had been
effectively critiqued by contemporary thinkers such as Dietrich Bhler8
and Karl-Otto Apel.9 These theories perpetuate Hegels model of history
which, as a history of spirit, focuses on the relation between truth and
signification. This theory retains from Hegel the fundamentally antiKantian affirmation of a rationality that is always situated in history
and expressed through symbols. In other words, truth does not transcend
history, but rather resides in a linguistic milieu through which the history
of spirit is effectuated. In this sense, the truth is not (to paraphrase Husserl) an immanent transcendence: that is, immanent to discourse, taking
shape in the world, which would claim to permanently transcend the historical limitations of cultural contexts that ground its truth-claims.
The key distinction from Hegel, however, is located in the hermeneutic refusal of critical reason, or negative work that proceeds by enquiry,
revision, doubt, and despair, and which follows the essential line of reason
through the various stages of consciousness and the different moments of
achieved understanding. These moments are not produced, but given,
thrown (geschickt) into the world as a destiny (Schicksal) in which the
individual subject has no role. Each of these moments in turn defines
an epoch of unmediated emergence, and these epochs would succeed
one another without rhyme or reason, as though arbitrarily. On the
8
9
See Bhler 1985.

See Apel 1980a; Apel 1980b.
77
other hand, Gadamer located in a shared horizon of meanings some intercultural communicative links that would provide the truth in historical
reason. But in Gadamers oversimplified version, the culturalist or structuralist degrammaticalisation of history ends in the radical discontinuity
of cultures, in a surrealist history that is no longer considered according
to the categories of production or communication, but according to the
category of creation. In terms of this new category, each unique sociohistorical constitution is abstracted or made absolute in a continuum
of meaning and reason and, because of this, it can only be the effect of
a radical creation (in Cornelius Castoriadiss sense of a mysteriously organised spontaneity, untethered from any process of formation).10
The idea of a pragmatic reconstruction of historical reason

For the purposes of this sketch, I will be pursuing two strategically important questions:
A. Why is the hermeneutic deconstruction of historical reason not intellectually satisfying?
B. How might a pragmatic reconstruction of historical reason be possible?
A. Internal critique of the hermeneutic
understanding of the world
The first point in this critique is related to the limitation of the principle
of understanding as it applies to historical reality. This limitation is difficult to define, however, because the hermeneutic principle of understanding is opposed to the analytic principle of explanation, or to the
so-called principle of reason. It is not, therefore, a question of accepting
this principle of reason in our understanding of history. Rather, such a
refusal would be methodologically justified by an epistemological foundation within the Geisteswissenschaften that responds to a broader concept
of the understanding of meaning. In truth, the ontological hypostasis of
method poses the greater problem as it moves from a systematic autonomy of understanding as an intellectual operation to a real autonomy of
10 See Castoriadis 1975.
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Jean-Marc Ferry
already-understood linguistic structures. For example, the pretext that signification is irreducible to causation denies the existence of any real link
between the different historical significations. More importantly, such an
approach excludes out of hand the hypothesis of a logical connection between symbolically structured cultural ensembles.
Thus, one certainly escapes what was thought to be the dogmatism
belonging to historical reason which would entail an irreversible succession in the order of culturally produced significations. On the other
hand, one represses the interpretative fact that recognises the impossibility of reversing an historical sequence. Consequently, one must refuse to
grant the principle of understanding itself (understood in terms of diachronic history) in order to keep the logico-semantic coherence exclusively within the order of synchronic culture. One denies that it is hermeneutically impossible to reverse this sequence: Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Dilthey, Heidegger (or again: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Stravinsky).
Under the pretext that history is free and indeterminate, one acts as
though Homer could have just as well emerged between Thomas Aquinas and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or antiquity between the feudal period
and the modern era.
The second point of this critique speaks to its limited approach to the
linguistic universe (or symbolic reality). Each already-understood linguistic structure is, in effect, secretly conceived as a semantic rather than a
syntactic disposition. It follows that the universal element of structure
continues unperceived, as well as the necessity of this universal, as understood from a pragmatic point of view. Implicitly, each historical event is
considered culturally idiosyncratic to the point that cultural understanding becomes impossible within the symbolic framework, beginning with
the problem of performative speech (at once differentiated and univocal,
that is to say, specified according to pronouns, voices, and verb tense and
mood). This universal grammar is itself, before any semanticisation of
language, the result of a pragmatic differentiation (that is realised in action) of the relationship between actors and their world. Such a relationship also postulates a process of disillusionments and frustrations, a typically dialectical process in which experience is not limited to a linguistic
milieu.
It follows that this hermeneutic idealism can doubt that communication between historical worlds is possible only because of the difference of
language, even as it renounces explanations of the fact that communication is possible between these worlds despite this difference of language.
79
Despite a close interrogation of this trans-historical communication

between cultures, historical time is not simply understood within that
which distinguishes it from mathematical or physical time,11 and this is
the third point in our critique. In fact, it is only from the perspective
of physical time that the succession of historical worlds is arbitrary, at
the cost of the absolute determinism of history. Whence the following dilemma: either historical succession is contingent, but without recognising
an irreversible historical sequence that is hermeneutically manifested, or
historical succession is necessary, but without granting either the autonomy of meaning or the liberty of history. By contrast, if one no longer considers historical time according to the model of physical time, this dilemma is resolved. As I will argue in the next section, this resolution depends
on the pragmatic reconstruction of historical reason.
B. Pragmatic reconstruction of historical reason12
This response demands a distinction between a dogmatic approach and a
critical approach, which, nevertheless, are accorded equal force within
this discussion. The dogmatic approach assumes a theory of experience
and education that integrates the logic of discourse. This approach was
most notably introduced by philosophical anthropology along three principal lines: language (understood as the representation and production of
symbolic forms); labour (understood in terms of the appropriation of external nature by a technical reproduction of its mechanism); and social
interaction (understood as an intersubjective relation marked by defining
moments of love, education, and the struggle for reciprocal recognition,
eventuating in systems of morality). This is not the place to systematically
develop this description or delineate the connections between these different moments in the construction of identity, whether individual or collective. It suffices to note the failure of these attempts, which is not necessarily due to the scope of their project, but rather to the strictures of
such systematic thinking. Even within these three dimensions of subject
formation (language, labour, social interaction), there is insufficient attention to the historicity in which these identities take shape. They
lack a fourth, historical, aspect, namely the dimension of discourse.
Whereas language, labour, and social interaction construct a constitutive
11 See Ricoeur 1983.
12 I have developed this argument further in Ferry 1991a.
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Jean-Marc Ferry
experience of social reality, discourse thematises the experience constructed within these milieux and differentiates relationships in the world. This
process of thematisation is itself the reflexive experience that constitutes
historical reality.
Discourse can be defined as reflexive action with respect to differentiated action, and thus discourses capacities realise grammatical capacities. On the one hand, discourse establishes self-awareness, which is
also a link of inter-awareness between different moments in the formation of personal identity. On the other hand, discourse forms identities
and their correspondent understanding of the world as it passes through
different registers or specific modes of expression, such as narration, interpretation, argumentation, reconstruction.
We are dealing with a closed sequence that is an ideal type (to use
Webers phrase) in the sense that it corresponds to essential moments
in the development of self-awareness and successful inter-communication. Each discursive category, as a dominant register of discourse, can
also be understood as an organising principle. The moment of narration
corresponds to a mythical understanding centred on categories of event
and destiny, while the moment of interpretation corresponds to a religious, cosmocentric, or theocentric understanding organised according
to the categories of law and justice. The moment of argumentation corresponds to critical understanding centred on the categories of reason and
law, whereas the moment of reconstruction corresponds to a dialectical
understanding organised according to the categories of history and language. Hegel aimed to detect the logico-semantic passage from one of
these categories to the next. Today, considering the different turns in
contemporary philosophy since Peirce, Frege, Austin, Wittgenstein and
others, Hegels intention endures. This shift is less speculative, however,
consisting in the abandonment of logic for pragmatics, in an attempt
to understand the categorial development of historical reason. Such an
attention to history incorporates the perspective of differentiated discourse registers, as well as their respective overcoming in light of a resolution to autonomous questions, that is, those questions brought forth by
responses that are proposed from one moment to the next.
However, even with the full realisation of this dogmatic approach,
understood in the technical Kantian sense of determinant movement,
the pragmatic reconstruction of the reason of history according to a discursive logic nevertheless remains unsatisfactory. The dogmatic approach
represents at most a process of successful formation. While this process is
specific to each cultural identity, the concept of universal history must ad-
81
equately demonstrate the progress of historical reason at a level that reconnects these different identities among cultures and without excluding
the possibility that these identities could eventuate in a complete formative development.
In presupposing a theory of discourse, the critical approach of a
pragmatic reconstruction of historical reason appeals to a theory of communication situated between cultural identities that are differentially organised in the milieux of labour, recognition, language and discourse.
This approach fosters a concept of historical time that is radically distinct
from concepts of physical time, and is equally capable of proposing a concept of historical reason that can remove the obstacles posed by determinism.
Pragmatic reconstruction thus adopts a point of view in which historical time is specifically configured through the successful communication
between different cultural worlds. In other words, if universal history requires a meaning, it constructs this meaning pragmatically through intercultural communication.
Thus, the Greek classical world did not truly enter modern Western
history until the Church Fathers undertook a process of intensive cultural
interpretation during the middle ages. Without this retrospective communication (largely aided by Islamic culture), the ancient Greek world
could not have been integrated into the pragmatic historical time of
Western Europe. Today, for example, the modern English and German
cultures could in many respects be considered the inheritors of the ancient Greek world, even though they have no claim to being its physical
descendants (which, in fact, is what we would have to consider the modern Greeks, who on the other hand do not necessarily appear as the historical inheritors of the ancient Greeks).
This means that the sequential order that forms the semantic weave of
history has its pragmatic basis only in communication. If the historical
world no longer has an objective reality, this is because the discourse
that organises the cultural worlds is also that by which the identity of
each open culture is developed, for it is by means of the discourse itself
that worlds effectively communicate with one another (or within themselves), and in this way their historicity becomes irreversibly fixed by a
structure that always defines their identity in relation to other cultures.
Identities form via an often-imperfect chain of communications, which
at the same time interconnects the fabric of world history. From this perspective, what each of these cultures tells us forms a history in which neither the beginning nor the end is visible, but in which each moment that
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Jean-Marc Ferry
they represent, as a communicational undertaking, describes an irreversible succession of meaning. This communication shapes the sequential
order in which one cultural identity cordons itself off from others. A cultural world does not allow itself to be historically situated except with respect to the significations that result from the manner in which it made
itself available for translation according to a particular mode of understanding. This mode of understanding not only had its own source of experience, but also defined itself via previously lived experience given
meaning by others. A culture does not communicate with others except
by the reflexivity through which it reaches the experience of experience.
It only cedes to history insofar as it is able to form itself by and through
such a process of communication.
By this we understand the canny reason of history that engages in the
process of meaningful identification, proceeding via an educational formation that follows the development of questions and answers. In
other words, the irreversibility of sequential history is not guaranteed
by a system of cause and effect, but by a dialectic of questions and answers. Though we are dealing with stylisation, the point eminently
holds good for various domains of culture, whether, for example, in art
history or science. The logical implications here are clear. It is not logically possible to reverse an illocutionary sequence of questions and responses emerging from the dialogical process, any more than it would
be possible to reverse a causal succession emerging from physical interaction. In the first case as in the second, the irreversibility of such sequences
is logically irrefutable. Nevertheless, this raises the determinist hypothesis
that could potentially influence the theory of reasons effect on the concept of history. Thus reconstructed, the concept of historical reason clearly reconciles the necessity of sequential order with the liberty of action
located in illocutionary relationships. In this way, historical reason
must be able to attenuate the partially closed manner in which the question of history often runs into the logical antinomy of freewill and determinism.
For this reason the answer should be thought of as free, in the absence of which there is only mechanical reaction, which is a consequence
that does not belong to the logic of communication. Certainly it is not
essential that this answer take place in the world; nor is it necessary
that this answer, if given, have a particular, determined content. By contrast, the necessary condition for the possibility of history requires that
one moment provoke another as an answer to a question. This sequential
order of events requires a strict determination of meaning by the dialec-
83
tical relation, making it the necessary condition for the irreversible succession of time interpreted within the order of history (as opposed to physical time). These considerations permit the following conclusion: there is
an objective element to these historical linkages that is not causal but illocutionary. This illocution (the act of speaking) permits a locution (that
which is said) to enter into communication with an interlocutor. It is illocution, then, that puts the various moments of a sequence into contact.
The speaking of illocution is the pragmatic condition of a possible historical link between cultural significations, while the spoken of locution
confers on this link its particular semantic determination.
Translated by Wilson Kaiser and Sarah Parker
Creative Delinking
Evelyne Grossman
The initial hypothesis of this paper is the following: a certain number of
20th-century writers and philosophers have explored, in the heart of the
writing they invented, the painful modern experience of the destruction
of linkages (psychic, linguistic, cultural, social, political). The object of
my current research is the analysis of the diverse forms of creative delinking and relinking that have opened up within art, thought and literature.
In my opinion, the question raised in this book, if I understand it properly, should be slightly changed. To my mind, what we should explore is
less the possibility of reformulating the deconstructive issues in a reconstructive way, but rather how to live with deconstruction. My assumption
is that deconstruction (or rather what I would call the delinking, the unabiding) is vital in every sense. It is the destructive power with which everyone has to live, to compose (in the sense of coping with, dealing
with), to create. If we deny this force, if we try to oppose it by establishing institutions and laws, as ingenious, generous and well-meaning as
they may be, sooner or later they will reappear as violence.
I use the term delinking not only in the sense defined by the psychoanalyst Andr Green (The analyst delinks the text and dements it),1 but
more broadly, and with acceptance not strictly psychoanalytic, in the
sense that these negative processes which dissociate thought, opening it
to other logical systems of rationality and creation. In this sense, contemporary relinkages would invent novel modes of linking, not necessarily
subject to prior models with aims that are normative, integrative (the religere of religions, sacred or secular), or simply narrative.
For fifteen years, my work has dealt with modern literary and philosophical works that rely on other modes of logic rather than those of narrative link or discursive rationality be it a matter of narratives, literary
fictions or philosophical texts, it is true that philosophical discourse has,
as one knows, traditionally made regular use of the narrative, the example-story, the metaphor, or the narrativised dialogue. If one compares,
however, the structure of the Platonic dialogues and the discursive ex1
Green 1993, 20.
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Evelyne Grossman
changes in Blanchots Infinite Conversation, the multi-voiced texts of Derrida (the Envois in his Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, the
beginning of The Monolingualism of the Other), addressing the body in
the work of Jean-Luc Nancy (Corpus), one will appreciate the strangeness
of these dissociated exchanges, employing a paradoxical logic of distended
links that resonate at a distance. Similarly, it suffices to recall the famous
definition of metaphor made by Proust at the beginning of the century in
Remembrance of Things Past (Just as in life, when bringing two sensations
together by a quality common to both, one will bring out their common
essence, reuniting the one and the other in a metaphor to protect them
from the contingencies of time), to grasp all that which separates the
Proustian syntax linking these chains of sensory association with the dissociated links of contemporary writing. Whether it is a matter of enlarging the field of sensation, of inventing new precepts and affects, as Deleuze says, or of redefining that which in writing is a bodily act, these
texts no longer tell narratives, in the traditional sense of the term.
Thus, I have attempted to reveal in the writings of Artaud and Joyce
the invention of a poetic writing which stitches up the loss of links between body and psyche: cruelty and discorps in the case of Artaud;
and, epiphanies, choreco, and chaosmos in the case of Joyce. My future research, my past experience of organising colloquia (on the passage of melancholy, the writings of the political body, the corporeal body of thought
in the work of Michaux, the writing of the stage in Beckett, the body of
the unformed, etc.), as well as articles dedicated to precise topics (the anaesthesia of affects and the feeling-at-a-distance found in the writing of
Duras, the melancholy in Cline, the malaise of the body in Barthes,
etc.), take part in the pursuit of this same query. The object of this research: not the narrative, imaginary, and metaphorical (being familial
and oedipal structures), but instead the dissociation in writing (close at
times to a psychosis), the relation to the real, and the attempt to invent
new creative links outside of sublimation in the Freudian sense of the
term wherein meaning without the motifs of above and below, the schemata of ascension and progression which distinguish, as Jean-Luc Nancy
has shown, the Freudian discourse on art and cultural sublimation. As an
echo of the enmity of contemporary writing toward the narrative story,
one should take into account the Foucauldian critique of the teleological
idea of chronological and progressive history, in favour of notions such as
archaeology, genealogy, emergence and discontinuous history.
Many modern texts are thus written out of experiences similar to psychotic destructuration, apparently transitory and controlled. I have at-
Creative Delinking
87
tempted to analyse the functioning and logic of this shocking psychic

plasticity that allows its authors to explore (or even suffer) the game of
sometimes violent, potentially destructive dissociations, then to re-emerge
relinking them in a style which embeds a body of writing and thought
into reality. Thus, far from the mere surrealist games of mental automatism aiming to release the preconscious springs of expression, the strange
writings of Blanchot, Duras, Beckett, Lacan or Derrida, for example,
open to logics of thought in language that previously did not always
have currency in literary or university institutions. Writings quite different from one another, it goes without saying, but whose deeper shared
lineage is important to perceive.
It is hardly useful to recall at length the two major upheavals that situate these writings: first the post-Freudian, and its theorisation of a deunified subject (cleaved, as Lacan would say) traversed by the unconscious
and desire, a theory which caused the illusion of a subject that is centred,
intentional, and conscious, master of itself and of its reason, to vacillate
(the postulate, thus, of a worrisome human irresponsibility). And second,
the trauma of unbridled, mechanised, technological massacres, which
since the First World War and continuing on to modern bloodshed industrialised, genocidal, terroristic have haunted the 20th and 21st centuries (the postulate of an equally worrisome and irrepressible destruction
impulse). This is what Freud attempted to theorise as an unremovable
death instinct deeply anchored within human beings. Like several aspects
of Freudian mythology, the notion, as one knows, is controversial. I
would however like to put it to the test (subjecting it to advances in neuroscience on cerebral destruction and reconstruction) through a transdisciplinary and methodical examination of literary and philosophical works
which have experimented with the delinking of thought as concerns its
analytic and interpretive force, its dazzling creative inventions, and its
power to reconstruct new links.
It will thus be a matter of examining how these works have proposed
(outside narration, outside narrative) the invention of new modes of
thought which could perhaps inspire, well beyond their own fields,
those who reflect on the mutation of our models of western (or globalised) civilisation.
Moving the question away from the utilitarian function of literature
or philosophy in our societies (the too immediately simple demand, what
is this good for?), and equally away from the Sartrean thesis of social and
political engagement (the literature of praxis), the approach that I would
like to propose invites an interrogation of the example-making and
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Evelyne Grossman
model-making functions of a certain number of 20th-century works in the

domain of literature and thought. In their fearless confrontation with
negativity, the inhuman, and the infinite at work in all creation, these
works, it seems to me, have allowed the drafting of new paths for the invention of other psychic, cultural and social links.
Deleuze said that writers, philosophers, and artists are explorers, not
of the (phenomenological) lived, but of the unlivable. They have seen
and heard forces too strong for them, unbreathable, intolerable, and
the binds of life along with that which threatens it. They return from
this eyes red, eardrums burst.2 It is this unlivable aspect that surpasses
all possibility of an integration of thought that expresses itself in these
writings.
These are archaic experiments that we must assemble in order to read
and then reach those not yet constituted dimensions which destructure
and reorganise their writing. Considering the texts of Artaud, one will
not, then, search to determine what is literally receivable (to reprise
the expression that he used in 1923 in his letters to Jacques Rivi re)3
from what would be gathered, for example, from asylum writings. One
might as well try to contrast what is fiction and what is critique in the
writings of Blanchot, or what is literature or philosophy in Derrida.
What unites these writings, beyond their singularity, is precisely that
they overturn the paradigms of our calm rationality. With this in
mind, the question of whether neurological wounds exist or not in the
case of Antonin Artaud (or Nietzsche, or Hlderlin, etc.) is of interest
only if it is moved into the context of what creative potentialities these
wounds could have allowed; one is aware of the fascination held by Breton and the surrealists for such natural delinkings in Artaud, whereas
they themselves had to put into place experimental conventions of dissociated thought: exquisite corpses, waking dreams, and objective chance.
As I have tried to show in my last two books,4 it is from this formidable power of creation residing in the heart of negativity that these authors, exploring that which undoes forms and overturns identities, tirelessly relink that which their analysis has dissociated: deconstruction (Derrida), undoing the work [dsoeuvrement], and disaster (Blanchot), unsaying [ddit] (Levinas), decreation, literature of the unword (Beckett), and
Lacans litany of there is no. A precise comparison of these gestures
2
3
4
Deleuze 1991, 161 162; Deleuze 1993, 14.

Artaud 2004, 69.
Grossman 2004; Grossman 2008.
Creative Delinking
89
of unlinking will have to be pursued. One could add: the discordance of

faculties (Deleuze against Kant), the breach (Bachelard, Althusser), the
constitutive dissociation (in the Hlderlin of Lacoue-Labarthe), the dissonant (Adorno), the historical discontinuity (Foucault), the disenclosion
(Jean-Luc Nancy), the fission of the self (Levinas).
Delinking and the inhuman

In Literature and the right to death, Maurice Blanchot extensively comments on the prodigious power of the negative that Koj ve has read in
Hegels work. This excess of negativity, Blanchot writes, is for us the
infinite heart of the passion of thought.5 This is a sentence we must keep
in mind when we read the texts of these writer-thinkers of the 20th century, if we hope to understand the link between anxiety, the exit of the
self and this indefatigable energy of the negative, which comprises the
singularity of their writings. When all is accounted for, that which they
confront is what sometimes they have called the inhuman, sometimes
the sublime. The two terms, one knows, were privileged in turn by
Jean-Franois Lyotard, who emphasised the role of confronting the inhuman in cases of anxiety, in the sense that the power of destruction surpasses the individual, an unpresentable that overwhelms thought. Such a paradoxical sentiment of joy and anxiety, of excitation and depression, is exactly, he emphasised, that which 17th- and 18th-century Europe rebaptised
under the name of the sublime.
When Jean-Franois Lyotard published The Inhuman in 1988, the
notion of humanism had for quite some time been questioned, problematised, and historicised. In France, what would later be called the
quarrel of humanism developed in the 1960s around structuralism
(Lvi-Strauss), psychoanalysis (Lacan), semiotics (Barthes), philosophy
(Althusser, Foucault, and others), and literature (first the Nouveau
Roman in the mid-1950s, then the writings of Blanchot, of Becketts second phase, of Michaux, of Marguerite Duras, of Genet, and of many
others). Summarised in broad strokes, Foucaults thesis can be stated as
such: humanism is a retrospective illusion of our occidental cultures.
Accordingly, the current question could be the following: after the
defeat of this historically determined figure of man, in particular as Foucalt says that of soft humanism, which has hardly known how to resist
5
Blanchot 1969, 308.
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Evelyne Grossman
to say the very least the crashing waves of 20th- and 21st-century barbarism, how can one reinvent another humanism that takes into account the
inhuman, which does not suppress it, does not deny it, but includes its
terrifying potentialities (including those of delinking), in order to confront them in full awareness of their cause, and to attempt not their sublimation into the symbolic space or into culture, but their relinking
through the reality of writing-bodies? It is the study of these modalities
of modern relinkage that I would like to pursue.
A question that must equally be posed: in this inquiry, why is there
such a proximity between writers and philosophers, whether they be writer-philosophers (like Sartre, Nietzsche, or others), writers deeply interested in philosophy (like Blanchot and Bataille), or philosophers fascinated
by literature (like Deleuze, Derrida, Heidegger, etc.)? Because in any
case, this is the hypothesis that one can make a nearly divine conception of language has developed in the 20th century. This appeared most
explicitly in the work of Foucault and Blanchot (but also in Derridean
deconstruction, to say nothing of Heidegger). For Foucault, only literature due to its experience with the infinity of language (its experience of
the being of language), can constitute an experiment in radical thought,
as well as an unexpected exit from the anthropological course of the
human sciences, from which philosophy should draw upon in order to
accomplish its own revolution. But what is language for many? It is precisely, not as we have for a long time affirmed the unique property of
mankind that characterises humanity and irreducibly separates human
from animal, to say nothing of stones To the contrary, the major discovery of the 20th century, it seems to me, is that language is the inhuman
essence of man: that which divides him and renders him other to himself
(Freud, Lacan), that which he will never possess personally, that to
which he will always remain a stranger (Derrida, Deleuze), and finally
an infinity whose eternal murmur threatens to drive him mad (Blanchot,
Artaud, Levinas, etc.). It is that delinking extends before all else as omnipotent, this inhumanity of language that disunites: an other inhabits me
and divides me, renders me a stranger to myself. Hence this, most likely,
is the fascination for literature and poetry shared by these philosophers.
The psychoanalyst Pierre Fdida recently proposed to distinguish between the inhuman and the dishuman. He called dishuman the extreme
psychic experience of temporarily abolishing the image of the likeness of
other human figures: an incident of barbarism, a programmed erasing of
Creative Delinking
91
all traces of humanity.6 Above all, this includes in the psychiatric experience that Fdida speaks, the incidence of dishumanity felt by certain limited or psychotic patients, who sometimes take themselves for a tree, a
stone, or a machine. For example, one knows that in the work of the
American psychiatrist Harold Searles, he describes experiences of this
type in those of his patients who suffer from an insufficient differentiation between exterior and interior reality.7 Once again, this suggests
that the exploration of human limits does not come without risks.
It is therefore necessary to take seriously, in light of these diverse epistemological intersections, certain contemporary reflections on the virtualisation of a hyperbody in cyberspace (Pierre Lvy). Far from being worrisome or catastrophic, such a virtualisation could open a path to the reinvention of other collective, democratic, but also artistic spaces transindividual spaces of creation perhaps less distant than one might believe
from the research on disfigured or disidentified writing carried out
by certain writers or modern thinkers. As certain current theories suggest,
if it is true that we are currently witnessing the continuance of hominidisation (via exo-darwinism as Michel Serres says) through the development of recent current and future technologies, in the interweaving of
text, body, and affect, it is then possible that the dimensions of thought
and writing conceived by the poets, writers, and philosophers at the end
of the 20th century had been very advanced (had been, as one used to say
of the avant-garde) in their perception of current mutations. Even better,
one might say that they had envisioned and anticipated them opening the
route to a reinvented humanism.
All form is an illusion, contemporary physics suggests: we move in
the midst of swarming atoms in inexhaustible motion; as far as one descends into the depths of physical matter, all is pullulation, energetic vibration, circulation, direction, pulsation nothing that resembles the
classic stability of our notions of volume and substance. This is what
these writers have most likely perceived better than anyone, rediscovering
at the heart of their practice of writing the pre-Socratic intuitions of the
structure of matter. We are provisional conglomerates of atoms, as Artaud, Bataille, Beckett, and the others repeat. We participate in all possible forms of life, wrote Artaud in Mexico in 1936, [] it is absurd to
limit life. A little of what we have been and above all what we must be lies
6
7
Fdida 2007.
Searles 1960.
92
Evelyne Grossman
obstinately in the stones, the plants, the animals, the landscapes and the
woods.8
On this account, it is possible that through the notion of Flesh (Artaud, Merleau-Ponty), that sensation, precepts, and affects according to
Deleuze, and the body without organs of Artaud or Deleuze and Guattari, were already an anticipation, in writing and concept, of the current
virtualisation of bodies which are open and in excess of their boundaries,
of bodies in infinite expansion. One must take seriously that which is
suggested by Artaud, but also said by Deleuze: the individual body,
locked inside its limits (the my-skin, the anatomical body, the bodychoker as Artaud says, the molar body, as Deleuze and Guattari say in
A Thousand Plateaus) is nothing except the fallout, enclosed in a symbolic
form, a figure (which could be that of my organic individual body) of
another body, a transindividual body-force, inventing another sensible
space (both corporeal and of thought, weaved of matter and sensations),
a new way of thinking that is not dissociated from feeling. In resonance
with these hypotheses is the Deleuzian proposition of extending the analysis of subjectivity to nonhuman vital modes (thus the auto-consistence of
sensation, independent of any affective backing).
Another form is most likely being born, one not necessarily human;
this is what Deleuze suggested at the end of an interview in 1986: It
could be an animal form of which man will be only an avatar, a divine
form of which he will be the reflection []. Today man is in relation
with other forces still (the cosmos in space, the particles in matter, the
silicon in the machine).9 In other terms: a power of non-organic
life of which man will have been only a provisional form.
As long, writes Jean-Luc Nancy,
as we will not have unreservedly thought of the ecotechnic creation of bodies
as the truth of our world, and as a truth which does not in any way cede to
those that myths, religions, and humanisms have been able to represent, we
will not have begun to think of this present world.10
This is to say that the bodies of modern writings are themselves also grafted onto these new representations, these new technical data and technologies which put into question their epidermic limits, the circumscribed
materiality of their textual and plastic situation.
8 Artaud 2004, 714.
9 Deleuze 1990, 160.
10 Nancy 1992, 33.
Creative Delinking
93
Question: does the work done by literature upon language have an

intrinsic ethical dimension? One knows that stories and narratives offer
less and less in the way of linkage. It is not a matter of evoking once
more the idea of the failure of grand narratives; the argument of a supposed postmodernism is too often a grab-all of unordered and depressive
ideas, improper to sustain conceptual invention and to mobilise creative
energy. It is more important to examine the recent doubt cast over the
veracity of retrospective stories, be they in their collective version
(myths and national histories, constructed as narratives, with interpretive
and unifying aims, of the historical past of collectives), or their singular
and private version. For this reason, the ambition of psychoanalysis is
somewhat problematically separated from a narrative and reconstructive
aim: to make an individual seize the truth of his history in order to become its subject. This is the task of the psychoanalyst according to Lacan.
One knows the phrase elaborated in Function and Field of Speech regarding the necessity for the subject to assume his history: That which we
teach the subject to recognize as his unconscious is his history: the future
anterior to what I will have been for that which I am becoming.11
Accordingly, with what validity can one still conform to the great
philosophico-narrative models elaborated on one hand by Paul Ricoeur
(the narrative as configuration of experience and of human temporality
in its relation to responsibility and the ethical), and on the other by Hannah Arendt (the narrative engenders the realisation of an essentially political thinking through the recounted action of a story that entails a human
life becoming political)? What is the case today of narrative linkages, if
their vulgarised hyper-diffusion serves only the hypnotic or manipulative
function of the discourses of political propaganda, advertising, industrial
or editorial by-products, or the fictional settings of reality television? In
this sense the works of Adorno and Benjamin on manipulative cultural
industries may help to deepen this question of the mounting distrust
of hardened, sclerotic narratives whose subjects are impelled to be identical with themselves.
Thus, that which is put into question in literary and philosophical
practice of creative relinking, is precisely the power of the story (in the
sense of narration) to once again durably relink meaning and truth.
What is the case of our ethical, judicial, and political systems in the
face of current delinked subjects? Can we content ourselves to endlessly
reinforce, in a constant invention of new texts and procedures, the rights
11 Lacan 1996, 300.
94
Evelyne Grossman
and needs, the judicial arsenal of national and international law (crimes
against humanity, international penal tribunals)? Can one simply trust
the enlightened good will of an ethic of responsibility (Hans Jonas),
or the pragmatism of an ethic of discussion (Jrgen Habermas)? If, as
Derrida suggested, the logic of the unconscious (let us expand: of delinking) is incompatible with that which defines the identity of the ethical, on
the basis of the delinked literary and philosophical logics of new subjects,
can one imagine promoting other models of responsibility, of the author,
of the intellectual, of the citizen (under the condition, it goes without
saying, of not confusing psychic plasticity with cynicism, sophistic opportunism and general relativism)?
Section II
The Limits of Deconstruction:
The Case of Art and Literature
Reality under Construction:

Deconstruction and Reconstruction in Surrealism
Timo Kaitaro
La vrit est dans la dconstruction.
(Ren Magritte)1
In his openly hostile criticism of surrealism, Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that

surrealist writing results in a triple destruction: it tends to destroy subjectivity, objectivity and finally also language.2 If Sartre is correct with his
diagnosis, we should perhaps consider that the surrealists had in practice
done something that prefigures the theoretical attempts to desconstruct
the subject, its representations and finally the whole notion of an objective reality put forward by some post-structuralist or postmodern philosophers. In fact, it seems logical that the death of the author in literary
theory proclaimed by Roland Barthes, should be preceded by practical attempts to prevent a unified and autonomous subject expressing itself in a
literary work, that is, by experiments in writing without an author or even
without subjectivity in the sense that Sartre understood it: as the subjects
recognition that his thoughts, emotions and volitions originate within
himself. Surrealist methods exposed the subject to the hazards of the heterogeneous: the unconscious, the materiality of language and artistic materials, and the unpredictable contribution of other subjects. These attempts resulted in texts and works of art in which the author could no
longer recognise himself, in whose creation he participated more as an
on-looker than as an author in the traditional sense. As Max Ernst observed already in 1933, surrealist techniques tend to upset critics by reducing the importance of the author.3
However, Annie Le Brun, one of the members of the surrealist group,
who lived long enough to see what she describes as effacing of the subject, the fragmentation of representation and the exclusion of totality,
is highly critical of these tendencies usually associated with post-structur1
2
3
Cited in Favry 2009, 150.

Sartre 1968, 215 216.
Ernst 1976, 43 45.
98
Timo Kaitaro
alism. She also refers to the exaltation of the fragmentary that is characteristic of certain forms of postmodernism. Le Brun does not so much
deny the effacing of the subject as a fact, but she sees it as something
that should be resisted. For Le Brun, theoretical attempts to deconstruct
subjectivity merely serve its disintegration. She writes:
It is as if, from the effacing of the subject to different enterprises of deconstruction, our critical modernity would have aimed to prevent thinking out,
all the while simulating it, this disintegration of beings and things.4
It seems that Andr Breton, who died in 1966, also lived long enough to
see the first symptoms of the dangers involved in unleashing the powers
around the dissolution of the subject. In a radio interview recorded in
1951, Breton observes that in the 1920s (when surrealism was born)
the human mind [lesprit] was threatened by solidification, whereas at
the time of the interview the danger is rather its dissolution. Breton
notes that this kind of situation calls for, on the part of youth today,
other reactions than those which another situation provoked us to, in
our youth.5 In its relation to power, subjective identity is a doubleedged sword. On the one hand, it can be the locus of resistance. On
the other hand, subjectivity is also internalised control and subjugation
to the norms of a rationality imposed through social construction. In
the 1920s, the surrealists thought that resistance involved the dissolution
of the subject. However, it is possible that modern capitalism needs, instead of subjects with stable identities, indefinitely modifiable identities:
passive consumers, to whom one can sell new identities and, employees,
whom one can recycle according to the needs of industry and commerce,
in place of persons identifying themselves with a specific and unique
function or profession. In this case, the dissolution of the subject
would profoundly change its meaning, since it had thus been, as Hal Foster observes in his commentary of Bretons interview, harnessed to the
service of the economical system that the surrealists opposed.6
4
5
6
Comme si, de leffacement du sujet aux diffrentes entreprises de dconstruction,

notre modernit critique avait eu pour fin relle dempcher de penser, tout en la
simulant, cette dsintgration des tres et des choses. Le Brun 1991, 77 78.
Il est bien vident que, de la part de la jeunesse daujourdhui, une telle situation
appelle dautres ractions que celles quoi put nous porter une autre situation,
dans notre jeunesse. Breton 1999, 571.
Foster 1997, 211.
Reality under Construction: Deconstruction and Reconstruction in Surrealism
99
Destruction and reconstruction of the object

By analysing the attitude of the surrealists toward attempts to criticise or
deconstruct the myths of authorial presence and objective reality, I propose to present a case study showing how the deconstructive process concerning meaning, language and subjectivity, instead of being an end in
itself, can actually be part of a larger constructive program. I claim that
surrealism involved not only a triple deconstruction of meaning, reference
and subjectivity but also a corresponding reconstruction of these. It is
true that by transgressing the paradigmatic combinatory rules of language, which govern the selection of words in a certain context, surrealist
images make literal reading impossible and thus block the ordinary meanings and references of words. Furthermore, surrealist images always
sought to combine elements so distant from each other that a metaphorical interpretation restoring common-sense meanings and references is at
least difficult, if not altogether impossible. Thus the objects of our familiar universe collapse through the transgressive use of language and we are
left with seemingly impossible or contradictory objects (but which in reality are merely surreal). Take, for example, Ren Chars images: sandrings of armours, mimetic nails or seismic treasure of famines. These images,
in contrast to such poetic expressions as Mussets sad silver tear of the coat
of the night, cannot be interpreted as metaphoric expressions referring, in
an oblique fashion, to the ordinary objects of prosaic everyday reality.7
Although surrealism seems to destroy the common language and the
reality it describes, this is not the whole story. It is true that in some of
Bretons earlier texts the destructive aspect dominates. For example, his
Introduction au discours sur le peu de ralit, wherein he examines the
problem of language and representation, Breton observes that one can attack the altogether apparent existence of things and observes that the
mediocre reality in which we live is created and sustained through the banality of our common language.8 Thus, we can attack this reality by mixing up the arrangement of words a phenomenon we have just observed
in the poetry of Char. But Breton also indicates that demonstrating the
7
The examples from the poetry of Ren Char (les anneaux du sable des cuirasses,
clous mimtiques, trsor sismique des famines) are taken from the collection Le marteau sans matre (1934). Mussets triste larme dargent de la Nuit comes from Mussets Le saule, from a passage often anthologised separately under the title of its
incipit: Pale toile du soir. For more examples of linguistic anomalies in surrealist poetry, see Kaitaro 2004, 305 313; Kaitaro 2008, 23 43.
Breton 1992, 276.
100
Timo Kaitaro
fragility of common-sense reality and its dependence on the language we

use in describing it, implies correspondent creative possibilities. In Merveilleux contre le myst re, Breton claims that the destruction of ordinary
prosaic ways of using language, which serve the simple function of exchanging information, and the corresponding systematic cultivation of
the poetic possibilities of language actually results in the recreation of
the world.9 The principal theorist of Belgian surrealism observed similarly that poetic activity aspires to invent new objects.10 Likewise, Roger
Caillois emphasised in a text published in Le surralisme au service de la
rvolution in 1933 that, even if surrealism aims at discrediting reality
and casting doubt on [] solid objectivity this attempt is countered
by making credible everything that the industrial and rational pragmatism is trying to deprive reality of .11
Dissolution and reconstruction of the subject

Claude Abastado has written that Breton does not question the unity of
the self [moi].12 Even if this may be in some sense true (Abastado quotes
some metaphors that Breton refers to in speaking about the psyche), it is
also the case that surrealist practices are liable to cast suspicion on the idea
of a unified subject. Breton observes that one has too hastily assumed a
unity of mind analogous to the unity of body, whereas, in fact, it is possible that we actually are inhabited [abritons] by a plurality of consciences.13
According to its Freudian rhetoric, surrealist thought allows unconscious desires to unveil in a text or in a piece of artwork. But perhaps
even more destabilising for the autonomous subject is that surrealist writing, artistic techniques and surrealist games do their best to provoke and
9 Breton 1999, 657.
10 Noug 1980, 85 89.
11 Ceci dit, leffort du surralisme sera peut-tre plus facilement situ: on a pu
croire quil travaillait dconsidrer la ralit, ou plus exactement mettre en
doute avec preuves lappui toute solidit objective. Cette proposition nest exacte que dialectiquement, cest--dire si lon consid re en mme temps laspect
antithtique de cet effort: accrditer tout ce que le pragmatisme industriel et rationnel avait tent de retrancher de la ralit, sans jamais apercevoir labsurdit
dune telle suppression. Caillois 1933, 30 31.
12 Abastado 1981.
13 Breton 1988, 243.
101
invite participating processes outside the authors control, for example,

chance, the autonomous tendencies of artistic materials and the contribution of other subjects. The rational subject of the Enlightenment whose
freedom strengthens through his or her autonomy withdraws leaving the
stage for a subjectivity that invites heteronomy instead of protecting its
autonomy. Again, Breton emphasises repeatedly that his destructive
move serves the purpose of unifying the subject and of gaining a freedom
that is different from that of the autonomous rational subject.14
The apparent contradiction between the emphasis on the unity of the
human mind and its dispersion is resolved, if one observes that when Breton
refers to the unity of the subject he is always speaking of a goal: the unity of
the subject is not a given but an achievement. Breton distinguishes between
the surrealist and spiritist uses of automatism by saying that whereas spiritism aims at the dissociation of personality, surrealism aims at its unification.15 Likewise, in the text What is surrealism? (Quest-ce que le surralisme?,
1934), Breton observes that by modifying our sensibilities, surrealism has
made a decisive step toward the unification of the human personality
threatened by dissolution.16 Thus practices that seem to question the
unity of the subject and to provoke its dissolution eventually aspire toward
unifying the subject.
The unity of the surrealist subject is, however, obviously not constituted
by the conscious subject of rational choices. In the beginning of Nadja,
when he poses the question who am I?, Breton observes that the objective
manifestations of our lives, which we consider more or less deliberate, in
fact refer to an activity the real domain of which appears to be completely
unknown.17 The signs discussed in the book reveal that the feeling that we
are alone at the helm of the ship is an illusion.18
If the surrealist subject is not centred on a conscious core representing
the subject of rational choices, one could present the hypothesis that the surrealists merely wished to replace this core with another instead of questioning the centredness of the subject as such. Some formulations of the
manifesto seem to suggest that the authentic core of the subject is in the
unconscious: surrealism is supposed to reveal the real functioning of the
14 For the conception of freedom implicit in surrealist practices, see Kaitaro 2008,
169 174.
15 Breton 1992, 386.
16 Breton 1992, 258.
17 Breton 1988, 647.
18 Breton 1988, 652.
102
Timo Kaitaro
mind.19 However, the main locus of automatic writing, and of surrealist activity in general, is actually between the conscious and the unconscious, in
their encounter or in their interplay, as Breton himself observes in the first
surrealist manifesto.20 In addition, in the beginning of Nadja, Breton denies
that subjectivity represents something pre-existing its manifestations. That
which constitutes the authentic nature of the subject, is not that which is
original, present from the beginning, but something that unfolds in
time.21 Revealing and the term here is already slightly misleading this
subjectivity requires that one is able to observe the appeals, solicitations
and signs coming from outside, and in which Bretons Nadja so eloquently
describes.
A reader whose habits of reading have been formed in the intellectual
ambience of post-structuralism and deconstruction would probably be sceptical about the idea of the real activity of the mind mentioned in the definition of surrealism. This seems to imply, according to Claude Abastado at
least, that automatic writing could reveal a psychic entity outside discourse,
an idea that one might find highly suspicious. Thus Abastado observes that
what one can read in texts is never an anterior subjectivity, but a subject
which constitutes itself in the act of writing.22 However, as we have
shown above in the analysis of the beginning of Nadja, this is just what Breton himself emphasised. As Foucault puts it in an interview discussing Breton on the occasion of the latters death: The imagination is not so much
what is born in the obscure heart of man as it is in what arises in the luminous thickness of discourse.23 In so far as the author is always dependent on
a pre-existing language and discursive practices, the effects of which he is
never completely in control, his productions inevitably have an excess of
meanings beyond what he actually wants to say. It is through having recourse to this characteristic of imagination, which seems to defy, undermine
and limit the autonomous subjects creative freedom, that surrealist practices
liberate subjectivity and imagination from their constraints. This proliferation of meanings reveals to the subject new possibilities and enlarges its
imaginative powers beyond what the conscious and autonomous subject
19
20
21
22
Breton 1988, 328.

Breton 1988, 332.
Breton 1988, 647 648.
Ce qui se peut lire dans les textes nest, ce nest jamais une subjectivit antrieure,
mais un sujet qui sinstitue dans lacte dcrire. Abastado 1981, 59 75.
23 Foucault 1999, 171 174. [L]imagination cest moins ce qui nat dans le cur
obscur de lhomme que ce qui surgit dans lpaisseur lumineuse du discours.
Foucault 2001, 582 585.
103
might intend and imagine in advance through having recourse to internalised structures and well-rehearsed productive strategies.
Allowing processes outside the subjects control to interfere with his or
her linguistic or cultural habits does not of course mean that one is able to
step outside culture and reveal a spontaneous natural subjectivity independent of linguistic or cultural structures.24 But one can force these structures to
produce new meanings instead of repeating what has already been said and
done: le dit et le redit through which we are stuck with the common ways
of structuring reality.25 And of course, although this may advance deliberately as the Belgian surrealists insisted,26 it does not advance consciously in the
sense of having a representation of the result, which is precisely supposed to
be something not yet seen or imagined. Hence, the surrealists insist that the
artist surprises not only the spectator but himself as well.27
Deconstructing the subject/object divide

The surrealists have often emphasised the correlative nature of the operations that tend to dissolve the unity of the subject and those that destroy
the stability of objects. In so far as surrealism casts doubt on the stability
of the external reality, it extends the same suspicion to the subject. In the
Introduction aux Contes bizarres dAchim dArnim, Breton refers to
Fichtes grandiose error that consists of believing in the attribution by
thought of being (objectivity) to a sensation extended in space. Such an
idea runs the risk of making the distinction between the real and the
imaginary rather fluid, if not to annul it altogether. Breton observes
that the dissolution of the limit between the objective and the subjective
is characteristic of altered states of consciousness tats seconds and
artistic creation, which is closely related to unconscious creation and
dreaming. But according to Breton this way of making the object dependent on the subject results in the exteriorisation, dissolution or dissem24
25
26
27
See Kaitaro 2004; Kaitaro 2008, 23 43.

Breton 1992, 276.
See Kaitaro 2004, 175 191.
See, for example, Bretons descriptions of de Chiricos method of painting or his
characterisation of the writings of Lautramont and Rimbaud, in Breton 1988,
629; Breton 1992, 389. The deliberate avoidance of preconceived ideas of the
result is evidenced by the practices of many surrealist painters, to whose methods
Vincent Bounoures term material automatism pertinently applies. See Kaitaro
2008, 153 161.
104
Timo Kaitaro
ination (parpillement), of the subject rather than reinforcing the subject

in favour of the object.28 Thus Breton observes propos Rimbaud and
Achim von Arnim:
For both of these poets, discovering in the representation the mechanisms of
the operations of the imagination and making the former dependent on the
latter, does not make sense but on the condition that the I itself is submitted
to the same treatment as the Object, that a formal reservation will shake the
foundations of the I am.29
The dissemination of the I in the external object, leads inevitably to the

disruption or the disturbance of personality which Rimbaud refers to in
his dictum: Je est un autre.30 If the dissolution of reality results in the
dissemination of the subject, the same correspondence applies to their
stability. Thus Ren Crevel makes the stability of the subject depend
on the stability of external objects: in stabilising and fixing the world
of objects, the subject checks its own mobility and freedom, so that it
would be vain to believe that it is a unique free subject in the middle
of fixed objects.31 Thus the surrealist attempt to destroy the reality solidified by our perceptual habits is at the same time a precondition and a
consequence of the liberation of the subject from its solidified identity,
which is replaced by a dynamic and fluid identity. The destruction of
identities, those of objects as well as those of the subject, and the liberation of the subject are eventually inseparable: the two sides of the same
coin. From the psychoanalytic point of view this correlation between
the stability of objects and that of the subject makes sense: since the principal function of the Ego is precisely to distinguish between subjective
mental images and external reality, it is obvious that its stability corresponds to that of objects. In addition, altered states of consciousness
where the boundary between the world of subjective representations
and that of external reality disappears are characterised by the weakening
sense of self and its separation and distinction from objects.
To sum up, surrealist activity really seems to destroy the belief in a
reality consisting of a fixed collection of definite objects. It attempts to
28 Breton 1992, 350 351.
29 Pour lun de ces po tes comme pour lautre, dcouvrir dans la reprsentation le
mcanisme des oprations de limagination et faire dpendre uniquement celle-l
de celle-ci na, bien entendu, de sens qu la condition que le Moi lui-mme soit
soumis au mme rgime que lObjet, quune rserve formelle vienne branler le
Je suis. Breton 1992, 350 351.
30 Breton 1992, 351.
31 Crevel 1986, 316 330.
105
show us a reality in constant flux, a reality where objects transform, metamorphose and lose their familiar contours. Objects yield to the delirious
and irrational interpretations of the subject. But corresponding to this destruction of objectivity, surrealism casts doubt on the existence of an autonomous subject independent of objects: the subject loses its purity and
its internal operations are shown to depend on external materials and accidents. Imagination traditionally contrasts with perception, which presumably depends on the exterior world for its objects. Imagination in
contrast presumably creates its own objects. The surrealists cast doubt
on this form of dualism. For them perception is a creative act and imagination always depends on the objects and materials of the real world.32
Even the seemingly passive and habitual perceptions of common everyday
objects are manifestations of original, creative and imaginative acts of
their invention.33 And, of course, the non-creative routine imagination
representing everyday realities is eventually based on the automatised
habits of perception.
Surrealism would certainly be a version of anti-realism, if reality were
defined as a collection of known and fixed objects existing independently
of the language we use to describe it and facing an immaterial and autonomous subject contemplating it. But if reality is seen as something in a
constant flux and open to an endless variety of interpretations enabling
the creation of novel and surreal objects, the name that the movement
gave itself should be taken seriously and literally: not as the opposite
of realism but as its radicalisation. The destabilisation of the subjects central position involved in surrealist practises results in the realisation that
reality is not merely the sum of all that one can perceive and imagine but
infinitely more: everything that one could see and imagine, if one would
let surrealist practices reveal and objectify the unexpected, the not-yet
seen or imagined, and thus, to enlarge the sphere of the imaginary and
the real. The insistence of surrealist theory and practice, that the dependence of objective reality on the constructive powers of subjectivity is not
to be identified with any non-realist form of constructivism. The reality
of surrealism is not so much constructed as under construction. Thus
there need not be any real contradiction between its destructive attacks
against the solidification of objective and subjective identities and the suspicions voiced by Annie Le Brun against apparently similar theoretical
enterprises contributing to a general suspicion against identities. For
32 Kaitaro 2008, 125 145.
33 Noug 1980.
106
Timo Kaitaro
the surrealists, there is nothing wrong with constructed identities, as long

as they are organic and living and not just solidified, fossil-like relics from
a bygone era.
Deconstructing and Reconstructing Artists with PhDs

Clive Cazeaux
MICHAEL CRAIG-MARTIN: There
are hundreds of kids in Britain doing
PhDs PhDs! in fine art. And the
terrible thing is, where does a PhD have
meaning? In the art world? No. It has
meaning in one place.
JOHN BALDESSARI: Teaching.
MICHAEL CRAIG-MARTIN: Now
whats going to happen is were going to
end up with schools that are entirely run
by people with PhDs, who have no experience of the art world at all. It could
not be a worse situation [Artists] are
doing the highest-level research in the
world. If you want the highest-level research, you need to go to Jeff Wall or
whomever. You need people who are out
there, in the world, doing what it is that
an artist does.
(Baldessari/Craig-Martin)1
Except: What does an artist do? Is there a definition or a set of necessary

or sufficient conditions which captures and describes what an artist does?
Arguably, since the transition in the 20th century from the readymade,
through happenings and conceptual art, to socially-engaged art practice,
there is no longer a set of clearly defined actions or properties which belong exclusively to art practice. Art is now an open concept, appropriating, subverting, challenging or rearticulating any context or discourse
with which it comes into contact.
The quotation displays Craig-Martins exasperation at the advent of
the PhD in fine art. His antipathy is directed against the idea that artists
might treat the PhD as an endorsement of their status as artists, a badge
of honour or achievement, when the qualification has no currency or
value in the art world in this respect. On this matter, he is probably
1
Baldessari/Craig-Martin 2009, 45 46 (original emphasis).
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Clive Cazeaux
right. However, unacknowledged and unchecked in Craig-Martins statements is the complex of competing institutional forces which constitutes
the art world. He does not make explicit what he means by art world
but, as far as he is concerned, it rules supreme as the domain which
counts when it comes to being an artist. He assumes, admittedly with assistance from Baldessari (his conversation partner), that the interests of
teaching are opposed to those of being an artist. This would seem to suggest a highly compartmentalised metaphysics is at work: learning, teaching, the construction of knowledge lie over there in the academic world;
the creation of art sits over here in the art world. An ironic state of affairs
given that Craig-Martins reputation in the art world rests equally upon
his practice as an artist and upon his being the head of the fine art department at Goldsmiths in the late 1980s when the YBAs the Young British
Artists, made up of Goldsmiths students including Angus Fairhurst,
Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Michael Landy, and Sarah Lucas exploded
onto the London art scene. There is no acknowledgment that both academia and the art world are institutions steered by economic and political
forces (including patronage, selection for posts or shows, and a celebrity
or star system) and, as such, may be able to work with or against one another (or any conciliatory or subversive relation in between) in affecting
those forces.
Most disappointingly, there is no acknowledgment from Craig-Martin that the intersection between art and research culture might generate
insights or resistances which are exciting for reasons either internal or external to the art world, or a series of hybrid, interdisciplinary practices
which upset conventional assessment criteria (which arguably would be
a good thing). While Craig-Martin might think that the concept of
what an artist does is readily available and can be unproblematically relied
upon, I suspect that an audience familiar with contemporary art, if pressed to write a list under the heading What an artist does, would arrive at a
long, sprawling and possibly contradictory sequence or cloud of terms.
To my mind, length, sprawl and contradiction would all be desirable
qualities. But the longer or fatter, more sprawling and contradictory the
list or cloud became, the weaker what an artist does would become as a
straightforward idea, easily isolatable from questions of learning, teaching, and the construction of knowledge.
What has the prospect of artists having PhDs got to do with the legacy of deconstruction? The workshop which gave rise to this book had
two aims (quoting from the original workshop brief ): (1) to assess whether deconstruction can still represent a resource, or contain a series of crit-
109
icalities, that challenges [philosophical, moral, political] insufficiency in

some manner, and (2) to establish whether these criticalities can be resolved through a different sensibility, mainly attentive to aspects of the
reconstruction of meaning, that seem to have come to light on more levels over the last two decades. Decisive for both aims is the distinction between deconstruction and reconstruction. The distinction embodies the
tensions, contradictions and demands which arise once one begins to
ask about the practical, moral and political application of deconstruction.
Reconstruction in the context of political philosophy expects philosophy
to make proposals or intervene in society in the interests of generating
better forms of life socially, politically, technologically, and culturally.
Habermas has serious reservations about the capacity of deconstruction
to answer ethical and political questions. In his first, notorious engagement with deconstruction, he accuses Derrida of levelling the distinction
between philosophy and literature and, in so doing, losing sight of the
specific way in which each mediates between expert cultures and the everyday world.2 In his Habermas-inspired critique, McCarthy argues that
deconstructions vocabulary of contradiction, destabilization, interruption, and undermining, does not lend itself to the projects of constructing and reconstructing the ideals, principles and laws which shape our
lives. However, for others, it is precisely deconstructions generation of
undecidability which confirms its political relevance, for example, with
Connolly, introducing a dissonanceconcordance relation into politics
to make room for unheard voices3 or, with Critchley, questioning a political regimes claims to legitimacy by demonstrating its reliance upon undecidable propositions.4 For some critics, there remains the problem with
deconstruction that it reduces the human subject to being the effect of a
textual or structural process, such as difference or desire, an epiphenomenon of a process which applies to meaning and the world in general.
There is therefore nothing that is proper to the subject. As Feltham
and Clemens make the point, in poststructuralism there is no distinction
between the general field of ontology and a theory of the subject; there is
no tension between the being of the subject and being in general.5 This is
something to which the philosophies of reconstruction and, more recently, of immanence, have responded.
2
3
4
5
Habermas 2006a, 30.

Connolly 1987, 138; cited in McCarthy 1991, 76.
Critchley 1999, 199.
Feltham/Clemens 2003, 4.
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Artists having PhDs, I want to argue, becomes a case in point for the
legacy of deconstruction in that fine art research forces us to consider the
ontology of art its nature, its presence, its amenability to categorisation,
whether it is a thing in itself and the relationships it has with what lies
outside art. What the fine art PhD does is prevent art from being on its
own. It affirms the idea that art is not a domain with a set of defining
properties which it can call its own (recall the problems I highlight for
Craig-Martins concept of artists doing what artists do). Art practice,
generated in the context of a PhD, is required to make a contribution
to knowledge. This happens through the artistic process intersecting
with or being subject to processes of recording, documentation, transcription, contextualisation, theorisation, argumentation, evaluation, and ultimately being located as an intervention in a discourse. Some commentators have identified interdisciplinarity, or the requirement that art engages
with the non-artistic, as being the source of the value of fine art research.
According to Sullivan, art is an activity in which visual and cultural understanding is refracted and transformed, and which allows us to observe
the processes of refraction and transformation taking place.6 Derridas deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence and Habermass call for a
new constellation of art and lifeworld bear on this topic because they
offer competing models of how art entails or opens onto the non-artistic.
As aspects of the deconstructionreconstruction debate, these concerns
converge on the ontology of aesthetico-political expression: what forms
and contexts might an art practice take that is crossing categories in either
a deconstructively textual or lifeworldly communicative fashion? And
how is the eitheror, the contest between deconstruction and reconstruction, to be addressed in this context? For both deconstruction and critical
theory attend to the role of concepts in discourse, and to the various elements of conceptuality which can impinge upon the direction of
thought and action. Most importantly, movement between categories is
central to their projects, but the nature of the movement and the end
which it works towards are different.
My paper is in two parts. (1) The first explicates the different understandings of the movement between categories (hereafter cross-categoriality) in Derridas deconstruction and Habermass critical theory. (2)
Part two exercises these differences in cross-categoriality in relation to a
hypothetical example of fine art research: a project to explore the possibilities of cycling as an art practice. Considering deconstructive and re6
Sullivan 2005, 86.
111
constructive philosophies in relation to a specific art project is by no

means straightforward. Art that is required to make a contribution to
knowledge creates a series of competing demands, and this allows the deconstructionreconstruction opposition to operate beyond a simple binary relation of undecidability and effectiveness.
Crossing categories
Movement between categories holds different meaning in deconstruction
and critical theory. With deconstruction, the issue can be approached by
asking whether reference to what an artist does, as an area of thought
and action which has unique properties, is possible. That is, is it possible
to refer to art as an essence, as a thing in itself ? As far as deconstruction is
concerned, belief in such a possibility counts as an instance of the metaphysics of presence: commitment to the notion that thought and perception directly refer to and engage with an entity, without recognition of
the web-like structure of concepts which simultaneously makes thought
and perception possible but also redirects or blocks them through its
own autonomy and density. Any attempt to assert that this property belongs uniquely to a domain, for example, art, will inevitably apply a concept which, in virtue of its relationship with other concepts, will bring
with it associations from those other concepts, thereby contaminating
any intended reference to a pure content. In an interview with Brunette
and Wills, Derrida declares:
There cannot be anything, and in particular any art, that isnt textualized in
the sense I give to the word text which goes beyond the purely discursive
[therefore] there is a text as soon as deconstruction is engaged in fields said to
be artistic, visual or spatial. There is text because there is always a little discourse somewhere in the visual arts, and also because even if there is no discourse, the effect of spacing already implies a textualization. For this reason,
the expansion of the concept of text is strategically decisive here. So the
works of art that are the most overwhelmingly silent cannot help but be
caught within a network of differences and references that give them a textual structure.7
The concept of text does not refer exclusively to written material. It is expanded beyond the purely discursive to embrace the artistic, visual or
spatial. Initially, it seems as if this is the result of there always being a
7
Derrida 1994d, 14 15.
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Clive Cazeaux
little discourse present in the arts, but then Derrida goes further, admitting that even if there is no discourse, the effect of spacing already implies a textualization. What might this mean?
A clue comes at the end of the quotation: it is the network of differences and references which gives rise to a textual structure. How are we to
understand the effect of spacing and a network of differences and references in extralinguistic terms? I suggest that elements from Kants and
Heideggers philosophies are present here. Experience is organised, determined; it occurs in segments and chunks. In Kantian terms, a network of
differences and references would designate the conceptually-organised
and conceptually-saturated nature of experience. Experience does not
come to us pure, unadulterated, but is rendered intelligible by concepts
shaping it into stable, continuous, recognisable lumps. With Heidegger,
human being is a being-there, a Da-sein, a state of being located in a situation in which things necessarily occur as something or another. 8 We are
always rooted in an environment, working with an environmentally-relevant aim or ambition, and so everything is experienced as a meaningful
this or that, as either ambition-related or ambition-unrelated. Our encounters with objects though are not strictly encounters in the sense that
an external object is met by an internal subject. Rather, they are a series of
attitudes or concerns in as much as what we perceive (through the senses),
think about and act upon (all that we would customarily take to be experiences or volitions inside us) occur as the interplays of situatedness
and directedness which define Da-sein, being-there, and which cannot
be divided into subject and object. This overcoming or avoidance of
subjectobject metaphysics is manifest in deconstruction through the ac8
As Stambaugh notes in her 1996 translation of Being and Time, it was Heideggers express wish that in future translations the word Dasein should be hyphenated. Heideggers thinking, Stambaugh continues, was that, with hyphenation,
the reader will be less prone to assume he or she understands it to refer to existence (which is the orthodox translation of Dasein) and with that translation
surreptitiously bring along all sorts of psychological connotations. It was Heideggers insight that human being is uncanny: we do not know who, or what, that is,
although, or perhaps precisely because, we are it. With Stambaugh, the hyphen
in Da-sein introduces a sense of the uncanny. Rather than having Da-sein remain
as a word which refers straightforwardly to human being as a clearly circumscribed thing to existence or to the subject the hyphen maintains the reference to
us but at the same time makes it other than us. It emphasises that human being is
distributed in a way that dualistic, Cartesian, subjectobject terminology does
not easily accommodate: a being there, an entity whose being is located and extended in the world. See Stambaugh 1996, xiv.
113
knowledgment that authorial intention (again, something we would customarily take to be inside us) is an impulse within the play of concepts
that is textuality. Both philosophies make the point that our experience
of the world is a continuum organised by certain structures, principles,
and frames. It is, I propose, this property of organisation which Derrida
refers to as text and which deconstruction works on, focusing on the
contradictions, slippages and plays introduced by concepts but always
mindful that the deconstructionists stance will itself be constructed by
concepts and therefore is always open to further contradiction.
Does this apply to non-verbal media and experience though? Isnt deconstruction essentially a linguistic strategy, a critical reading which can
only set to work if verbal categories prone to wordplay, metaphor or binary inversion are present? What would count as the deconstruction of
categories at work in visual art and knowledge? Melville provides a helpful study of the deconstruction of colour in art history.9 Colour and art
history, for Melville, play the respective roles of extralinguistic experience
and linguistically-saturated knowledge. He argues against the increasing
dominance of semiotics in art history, and its tendency to turn artefacts
into occasions for linguistic, structural reading which, he maintains, say
more about the ease and fluidity of signification than the materiality of
the artefact. In the perception and interpretation of colour, Melville argues, there is always a particularity of sensation which exceeds signification. What is novel about his account is how he positions this excess. He
locates it as a crisis in propriety: deconstruction of the visual as the calling-into-question of the appropriateness of each and every theoretical
framework. What transpires between the texts of deconstruction as
they currently stand and the visual arts, their criticism and history, he
argues,
is neither appropriation nor depropriation of the one activity or object to the
other [sic], but a warping in the grammar of propriety itself. One might then
say that the demand is for the visual arts and their discipline to appropriate
themselves otherwise. But the deeper demand is for them to acknowledge
that they have always done so.10
Melville effectively uses art historys theorisation of colour to deconstruct

the linguisticextralinguistic distinction. The particularity of colour is
fully acknowledged, but rather than placing it outside discourse, it is positioned as an oscillation or vibration disturbing the borders of art history
9 Melville 1994.
10 Melville 1994, 46 47.
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and all adjacent theoretical frameworks.11 This puts the deconstructionist

critic in the position where they must be mindful of the contingency of
any theoretical reading of an artwork and permanently open to the claims
from alternative and possibly opposing theories. On this reading, the visual work of art is a text and, therefore, a contender for deconstruction
because its properties, its determinations, the concepts which shape our
engagement with it, plus any historical or theoretical discourse which surrounds it, are part of a network of differences and references. These are
always open to reappraisal on account of the fact that each and every experience or perception of the work will involve differences and slippages
between properties, determinations, and concepts. We still think and
speak in categories but these are always already looking towards or opening onto other categories.
The movement between categories as it affects art, and what lies beyond it, is different for Habermas. How can art within modernity work
against its own inner logic, the drive to be for its own sake, to promote
the cross-referral of categories in the interests of social reintegration? This
is the question Habermas puts to himself in his 1981 essay Modernity
versus Postmodernity. Artistic production, Habermas declares, would
dry up, if it were not carried out in the form of a specialized treatment
of autonomous problems, and if it were to cease to be the concern of experts who do not pay so much attention to exoteric questions.12 These
problems are autonomous in the sense that they pertain to the Enlightenment project of specialisation. So far so good, as far as Craig-Martins
notion of a pure fine art is concerned, with the added support of experts
who are content to discuss art for arts sake. However, Habermas continues:
this sharp delineation, this exclusive concentration on one aspect of validity
alone, and the exclusion of aspects of truth and justice, breaks down as soon
as aesthetic experience is drawn into an individual life history and is absorbed
into ordinary life. The reception of art by the layman, or by the everyday expert, goes in a rather different direction than the reception of art by the professional critic.13
In his attempt to overcome the division between the everyday and the
professional, Habermas draws upon the claim from Albrecht Wellmer
that (in Habermass words) as soon as an aesthetic experience is used
11 Melville 1994, 45.
12 Habermas 2000a, 275.
13 Habermas 2000a, 275 (my emphasis).
115
to illuminate a life-historical situation and is related to life problems, it

enters into a language game which is no longer that of the aesthetic critic.14 This promises, as far as Habermas is concerned, a changed constellation of art and the lifeworld:
If aesthetic experience is incorporated into the context of individual life-histories, if it is utilized to illuminate a situation and to throw light on individual life-problems if it communicated to all its impulses to a collective form
of life then art enters into a language game which is no longer that of aesthetic criticism, but belongs, rather, to everyday communicative practice It
reaches into our cognitive interpretations and normative expectations and
transforms the totality in which these moments are related to each other.15
The changed constellation whereby art has the potential to make a difference within everyday communicative practice comes about if [art] is
utilized to illuminate a situation and to throw light on individual lifeproblems. But what brings Habermass changed constellation about?
He refers to the actions or forces responsible for these cross-categorial
movements in the following ways: aesthetic experience is drawn into
an individual life and aesthetic experience is used to illuminate a life-historical situation and is related to life problems, but how and for whom
we are not told. This is clarified by Wellmer. The work of art, he writes
(quoted by Habermas), as a symbolic formation with an aesthetic validity
claim, is at the same time an object of the lifeworld experience, in which
the three validity domains are unmetaphorically intermeshed.16 The validity claim is Habermass technical term, from The Theory of Communicative Action, for the conditions surrounding an utterance which confirm
that it is made in the interests of arriving at a rational consensus.17 The
three validity domains are: truth, being right in accordance with a normative context, and genuine intention on the part of the speaker. The key
premise in Wellmers argument is that the artwork, as a symbolic formation, as something made, constructed, organised in accordance with (or
against) certain conventions, is just as much an occupant of the art world
as it is of the everyday world.
There are similarities here with Kants aesthetics and epistemology in
that aesthetic judgment, on Kants terms, is not formed from concepts peculiar to the aesthetic but is instead constituted by a state of free play (or
14
15
16
17
Habermas
Habermas
Habermas
Habermas
2000a, 275.
2000b, 280.
2000b, 281.
1984, 99 100.
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purposiveness in Kants terms) in our moral and cognitive capacities.

This could be construed as the aesthetic at work in the lifeworld. Duvenage lends support to this reading. The world-disclosing force of the aesthetic, he asserts, lies for Wellmer in its constantly interacting with the
moral and cognitive perspectives of the world [] leading readers to
questions rather than answers, opening readers to new experiences of otherness, and disrupting previous fixities, where world disclosure refers to
the KantianHeideggerian ontological model of mutual subjectobject
(with Kant) or beingworld (with Heidegger) organisation.18 This interpretation goes against the formalist reading of Kants aesthetics, which
concentrates upon his notion that aesthetic judgment is disinterested,
that is to say, it does not employ a determinate concept, and so all that
matters regarding the object of appreciation is the way in which its sensory properties are arranged in space or time. The formalist account values aesthetic properties for themselves but is difficult to sustain as a Kantian position, I would argue, because it pays no heed to that part of the
aesthetic which purposively stimulates our cognitive and moral faculties,
the bridging role which Kant has the aesthetic play between the architectonics of the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason. 19
My comparison of cross-categoriality in Derrida and Habermas
would seem to suggest they converge, or at least are leaning that way.
On my reading, both have sympathies with the Kantian notion that art
interrupts stable patterns of categorisation, with the political value of
such interruption being that room is made for alternative forms of thinking or practice. This would not be the first time that the philosophies of
Derrida and Habermas are judged to be heading in the same direction. As
Critchley writes, Derridas work is oriented around the quasi-normative
axis of an emancipatory, democratic politics, based on the undeconstructible, context-transcendent, formal universality of justice. Kurz gesagt,
Derrida sounds like Habermas, doesnt he?20 But, Critchley goes on, despite the agreements between Derrida and Habermas, important differences remain: (1) Derrida would object to Habermass requirement that (in
Critchleys words) all matters must be either empirically or normatively
justified; (2) from the perspective of the Frankfurt School, Derridas
work (Critchley again) is too exclusively philosophical, and belongs to
18 Duvenage 2003, 137.
19 Kant 1929; Kant 1956.
20 Critchley 2006, 100.
117
what Horkheimer would call traditional rather than critical theory;21 that
is to say, Derrida concentrates upon metaphysical or logocentric concepts
as they operate in texts from the history of philosophy at the expense of
considering their sociological application; and (3) they differ over the intersubjective nature of the concrete linguistic event: Derrida regards it as
a singularity, an experience of infinite indebtedness containing an obligation that no interlocutor could meet, while Habermass Kantianism,
based on the premise of the equal treatment of all human beings,
means he configures the linguistic event as a symmetrical meeting of
equals, devoid of any unevenness or asymmetry introduced by a sense
of obligation.
There is not room in this paper to pursue a fine-grained analysis of
the differences between Derrida and Habermas. However, running
through the differences is a theme which marks a clear division between
deconstruction and critical theory over the interruption caused to conceptualisation by cross-categorial aesthetics. A deconstructive crossing of categories occurs as a thoroughgoing (or infinite if we follow Critchley)
questioning of the category or theoretical framework which is applied
at every particular instant. We might recall Melvilles suggestion that
the deconstruction of visual art functions as a challenge to propriety, a
perpetual attentiveness to the contingency of all frameworks. In contrast,
with Habermas and Wellmer, the interruption caused to conceptualisation by cross-categorial aesthetics requires mediation to the point where
it can be answerable to validity claims. No matter how novel, stimulating
or disruptive an artwork, the transition in categories which it instigates
has to occur as part of the translation of art into an everyday context,
into a setting where the validity of whatever change or novelty has
been introduced can be confirmed (or denied). For Habermas, this occurs
in terms of consensus based on the ideal speech situation in which participants work towards a mutual understanding free from the pressures
that can be introduced by self-interest and other agendas. With Wellmer,
there is mediation between the world-disclosing force of the aesthetic and
discursive reason via, according to Duvenage, an interrelated model of
validity spheres of truth which places emphasis on interpretations and
judgments of all kinds and finding a horizon such that plural values
21 Critchley 2006, 100 101.
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and needs can become part of rational arguments and discourse ethics on
an equal basis.22
We have two kinds of resistance: thoroughgoing or infinite with Derrida, and translated or mediated with Habermas and Wellmer. In the context of the deconstructionreconstruction debate, it is a question of the
nature or possibly even the ontology of the resistance: what form or
shape it is, in which direction or directions it is pointing or whether it
needs to point at all. The last phrase is an acknowledgment that the resistance may not necessarily be an obstacle between us and an understanding or goal or the world, but instead might be something we are already
in, something which is constitutive of our being in the world, a period in
which we are situated in treacle, metaphorically and ontologically speaking: modes of thinking and action we normally take for granted are suspended, taken over by the infinite demand of How to judge? Which
concept to apply? once one becomes mindful of the open and contingent
nature of categorisation. How might this difference be illuminated?
J. L. Austins distinction between performative and constative statements
could apply.23 Performative refers to utterances which act or bring into
being the very thing they name, for example, saying I promise is both
an utterance (the locutionary act, in Austins idiom) and an action produced by the utterance (the illocutionary act). In contrast, constative expressions are merely locutionary acts: they describe or refer to the world
but no action comes from them; they have no illocutionary force other
than possibly the bringing-into-being of the very general action of drawing attention to how things are in the world. Habermass requirement
that all claims must be either empirically or normatively justified assumes
a constative, referential relation with the world or at least a translation between the constative and the performative, whereas Derrida activates
word plays, near synonyms, and root metaphors to make us aware that
language is a condition of textuality in which we are located. However,
the performativeconstative distinction is not something which should
be immune from deconstruction, as Derrida observes, but I shall not
22 Duvenage 2003, 137. There is a subtle but important difference between Habermass and Wellmers positions at this point: the former requires the formation
of a shared understanding, whereas the latter refers to a horizon for argument,
which implies that only the conditions for dialogue, as opposed to actual agreement, are involved. Irrespective of this difference, both see the aesthetic undergoing a process of mediation so that its terms can be adapted to apply to objects
or events in the interests of promoting sincere, reliable and verifiable discourse.
23 Austin 1971.
119
have time to pursue this avenue.24 For the moment we must be content
with examining the resistances in translation, mediation and performativity.
Deconstruction, reconstruction and fine art research

As I announced above, one of the aims of this book (and the project
which inspired it) is to establish whether the criticalities of deconstruction
can be resolved through a different sensibility, mainly attentive to aspects
of the reconstruction of meaning, that seem to have come to light on
more levels over the last two decades. It is at this point where I think consideration of visual art research can help. What would Derridean deconstruction vs. Habermasian reconstruction be like within visual practice?
How would their contrasting attitudes to cross-categoriality manifest
themselves visually? What might fine art, under the research imperative
of not being on its own but contributing to knowledge, add to the understanding of the resistance generated by movement between categories?
How might this make a difference to the deconstructionreconstruction
opposition? The question which started us on this path concerned the opposition between fine art and fine art research. Let us consider an example.
Suppose I am an artist who wants to explore the possibilities of cycling as an art practice. Not in the form of the depiction or representation
of cycling, as in the case, for example, of Umberto Boccionis 1913 painting Dynamism of a Cyclist, expressing the Futurists celebration of machines, but in a way which draws upon the activity of cycling itself.
The former presents us with questions of how one medium, say paint
or stone, might be manipulated to evoke or recreate the appearance or
other aspects of cycling, whereas the latter asks us to consider the embodied, technological or social dimension of cycling as the foundation for an
artistic event. Why the latter and not the former? It is not as if one promises more opportunities for cross-categorial activity than the other. It is
certainly the case that studies of representation and expression are more
extensive and further underway in art history and philosophical aesthetics. The competing discourses in these studies would be grist to the deconstructionists mill in as much as a deconstructed art history would
24 Derrida 2002b, 204.
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have to come to terms with the contingency of its discourses and the potential for differential or cross-framework critique.
I can only answer the question from within the context of the example. Hypothetically, I am an artist who cycles and who, given the almostinfinite potential of what can now become art, is interested in how the
range of physical, technological, environmental and social dimensions
of cycling might be manipulated, heightened, elevated or transformed
to become art, but not just to become art. My interest (as a hypothetical
artist) also lies in how the relationship between concepts might be configured given the degree of borrowing or exchange which occurs between the
concepts of art or aesthetics and technology, ecology, politics, society and the everyday. Since the relations between these concepts will be
anything but a series of distinct, isolated, non-overlapping domains, this
hypothetical interest should be useful in bringing to light a vocabulary of
exchanges, manipulations, elevations, and transformations operating
within fine art and adjacent practices and, therefore, be highly pertinent
in a context where cross-categoriality is key. On the basis of the Kantian
epistemology underpinning Derridas and Habermass theories, wherein
experience is formulated as a process constructed by categories, if we
pay attention to the different kinds of movement within this vocabulary,
and the movements articulated by the various methods used to formulate
art as a contribution to knowledge, then we shall begin to witness how
and where fine art research stands in relation to Derridas and Habermass
competing, cross-categorial resistances. Because the range of methods
available to the fine art researcher is extensive Gray and Malins list fourteen25 I shall, for reasons of space, limit my attention to one method:
the critical, contextual survey as a provider of both research background
and direction. This will also help to explain the significance of the example for the deconstructionreconstruction contest.
The research process begins with a proposal which sets out the question, places it in its subject context, and gives an indication as to why it is
important. As with any research proposal, we do not want something so
singular and out of the blue that there are no competing, surrounding or
neighbouring practices to give the proposal context. In broad terms, one
might look to the walking and other everyday or culturally-embedded
practices which have been included in or forced a widening of concepts
of art and aesthetics in recent decades, such as the work of Hamish Fulton, Richard Long, Simon Pope (all walking artists), and Tino Sehgal
25 Gray/Malins 2004, 103.
121
(conversation), Hans Haacke and the Austrian artists group WochenKlausur (administration). The critical themes behind these artists
works are: the challenge to the conventional notion of the art object;
the identification of aesthetic observations in everyday settings; the injection of the aesthetic into the everyday to create novel, social events or relationships; and rendering visible, tangible or social what happens when
categories intersect (that is, the physical, sensory form taken by these
processes, and the meanings given to them by their physical, sensory
form), with the consequent demand for audiences, critics, theorists and
the artists themselves to evaluate the renderings in a context where categories are far from stable.
More specifically, a number of artists in the last ten years have used
cycling in their work. In 2009, Steven Levon Ounanian completed a thirty-day, 1,000 mile ecological pilgrimage by bicycle around Britain,
called Ritualride. Ounanian visited ecologically-significant sites such as
farms, solar-panelled mosques, micro-climates, and McDonalds, and invited people involved with each site to tell stories related to or create
myths which could be attached to the local environment. For her 2010
performance Body as Machine Experiment 1: RAW in Glasgow, Scotland,
Kate Stannard sought to recreate the physical demands of the annual
Race Across the West endurance cycle event. The ride is a time trial
across North America covering 3,000 miles with the fastest solo participants completing the course in just over eight days, achieving an average
speed of approximately fifteen miles per hour and getting the recommended minimum of 90 minutes sleep per day. Stannard trained as if
she were taking part and then, for the public performance, cycled on
an indoor cycle training machine in an art centre continuously for four
days, breaking for the daily recommended minimum sleep period. A
forty-one mile ride across the Tabernas desert in Spain on an improvised
electric bicycle was the basis for Simon Starlings 2004 piece Tabernas
Desert Run. The bicycle was driven by a 900-watt electric motor which
was in turn powered by a portable fuel cell attached to the bicycles
frame. The only waste product from the motor was pure water, which
Starling used to create a large, botanical-style watercolour painting (the
size of the bicycle) of an opuntia cactus, a species introduced to the desert
by the film director Sergio Leone during the production of his spaghetti
westerns. As an exhibited work, the bicycle and the painting are sealed in
a perspex vitrine, with the painting visible from one side, the bicycle from
the other.
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What are the critical contexts here? There are similar themes to the
walking, conversational and administrative art practices outlined above.
The conventional notion of the art object is by-passed. All three are primarily cycle rides or performances. Only Starlings Tabernas Desert Run
takes the form of exhibited objects, but arguably the combination of a
painting, an improvised electric bicycle and the explanatory text points
strongly towards the painting and the bicycle being stages in a process.
Ounanians ride and Stannards performance also have enduring traces
a video, and photographs and first-person commentary on a blog respectively but these are primarily documentary in nature, although
the capacity of documentation to generate new meaning or give rise to
aesthetic qualities is not insignificant. There is the interplay between
the aesthetic and the everyday: the introduction of the aesthetic into
the everyday to create novel, social events or relationships, and the
scope for aesthetic observations within everyday settings. The novel social
events or relationships created via the introduction of the aesthetic include the reactions and greetings received by Ounanian, participation
in Ritualride by interested cyclists, and the acts of giving elicited from
Stannards audience. Aesthetic observations within these might be the
words, phrases, sounds, expressions and gestures which occur as part of
the reactions and greetings received by Ounanian, the extreme physical
and emotional states endured by Stannard, and the nature of the gifts
left for her. There is the poetic, metaphor-like leaping-between-realms
of Starlings process: the transition from desert cycling, through motor
power, through water, to the painting enabled by the water. The ways
in which all these events are described or documented may also be occasions for poetic expression, since verbal language, photographic framing,
and video sound and image are media whose specific properties bring
with them their own potentials for meaning.
The original deconstructionreconstruction opposition hinges upon
whether deconstructions vocabulary of contradiction, destabilisation,
interruption, and undermining lends itself to or disables the projects
of constructing and reconstructing the ideals, principles and laws which
shape our lives. How might fine art research, as a novel context for the
deconstructionreconstruction opposition, affect the stand-off ? Answering this would be to view fine art research as a form of aesthetico-political
expression whose mode or modes of cross-categorial resistance might help
to crystallise or generate relations between deconstruction and reconstruction other than a stand-off. The expectation is not that any of the works
described or any future artcycling work targets a philosophical position,
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but that the works themselves, through their internal organisation, the
placing of one thing in relation to another or the eliciting of one thing
by another, exercise concepts, throw concepts together, enable one concept to open onto another. The arrangement and constitution of the artworks tug on the Kantianism underlying Derridas and Habermass philosophies in as much as each thing, each aspect, each affect, each collision,
and each evocation will involve a concept. Any intelligible unit of experience requires a concept, and aesthetic moments, those which Kant
claims ostensibly occur disinterestedly in the absence of a concept, are occasions when our cognitive faculties are in a state of freeplay looking for a
concept. As far as the artcycling theme is concerned, demonstrating the
impact of fine art research on the deconstructionreconstruction opposition will be a matter of assessing the conceptual movements generated by
artcycling in terms of the resistance they present in the transition from
one category to another.
Let us focus on a particular example from one of the works described
so far: a video clip from one of the many which are freely available on
Ounanians Ritualride website. The clip, entitled Doncaster Earth Centre, is 1 minute and 57 seconds long, and surveys a large area of flat tarmac, fenced off from surrounding heathland and occupied by different
kinds of junk, from a dilapidated milk float and an old fire engine
with the sign Earth Centre on one of its doors, to what looks like the
flattened remains of office interiors and a wooden porters hut, painted
black and in incongruously good condition (fig. 1). The video takes us
step-by-step around the site, and Ounanians voiceover ironically presents
it as an exhibit at Doncasters Earth Centre in Yorkshire, England. The
irony coheres with the humour in the commentaries on some of the
other video excerpts, but is also pertinent here because Doncasters
Earth Centre, designed as a world-centre for the display of leading sustainability theory and practice, closed in 2004 after only five years operation due to lack of funding.
Where are the resistances? From a deconstructive point of view, the
properties of a work of art, the concepts which shape our engagement
with it, plus any historical or theoretical discourse which surrounds it,
are part of a network of differences and references. These are open to constant reappraisal (or infinite demand) because each and every experience
or perception of the work will involve differences and slippages between
properties, determinations, and concepts. Ritualride is not an object with
a readily identifiable set of properties but a two-month long event with an
ongoing identity via web and video documentation. It has a variety of
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Clive Cazeaux
Fig. 1: Steven Levon Ounanian, Ritualride (2009). www.ritualride.com

(seen 25. 11. 2011). Permission to reproduce screenshot granted by the artist, and
gratefully received.
forms. Should we look to the stated aims of the project or work with selected, particular aspects of it? Although the Doncaster Earth Centre excerpt adheres to the aim of visiting ecologically-significant sites, no other
voices are heard, which runs counter to the stated aim of inviting stories
from others, unless we accept the welcome to the exhibit commentary as
the story. Ounanian uses humour and irony in his commentary, thereby
introducing new concepts and ones which entail playfulness and the suspension or cancellation of assertion. We are placed in a situation where,
because of the multifaceted nature of the work, we face an array of concepts cycling, ecology, wasteland, junk, recycling, failure, encountering
others (or not), storytelling (or not), irony, humour, hand-held video
that make it ambiguous in which direction we should move to begin
making a conceptual or declarative commitment that can be subject to
deconstruction.
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We do not know from which conceptual perspective to approach the

work. Is our situation one of utter undecidability in which we cannot
even begin to apply concepts as the starting-points for cross-categorial
slippages? If it were, it could be construed either as an exemplary deconstructive encounter with an artwork or as an encounter which refuses the
stable application of categories, depending upon whether utter undecidability is taken to stretch textuality to its limit or to cancel it completely
respectively. On closer inspection, however, this predicament turns out
not to be the case. As hinted at above, the stated aims of the work introduce concepts which we can work from. More importantly, Ritualride
is being considered in relation to artcycling as fine art research, so cycling as art introduces a line of enquiry which obliges us to use concepts
and make claims. Cycling here is not just one term among many but the
term which becomes art in virtue of the art histories and theories which
expand upon mechanisms of becoming, appropriation, defamiliarisation,
institutional baptism, metaphor, performativity, transformation, and the
process of categorisation itself, since with some epistemologies, assigning
the category is sufficient. Even if a case can be made for establishing
which theory is or theories are most applicable, the deconstructionist
must be mindful of the contingency of any theoretical reading of an artwork and permanently open to the claims from alternative and possibly
opposing theories.
If cycling is to become art, then we need familiarity with the theories
of becoming art which will explain the process. The work itself cannot
tell us how its cycling-content became art, because there is no work itself
outside of the textual play of categories. Rather, it will be a matter of: (a)
the categories which can be applied to cycling and what cycling leads to,
opens onto or invites as accompaniment (such as arrival at junkyards and
sites of failure, encountering others (or not), humour, and hand-held
video); (b) the theories or ontologies of becoming art which underpin
the mechanisms of transition or accompaniment; and (c) mindfulness
of the contingency of the categories and theories application. The observation that theories of becoming will be applied to cycling and what it
leads to, opens onto or invites as accompaniment shows that we cannot
even reach a presence, a thing, an activity called cycling because whatever instance or occasion is offered as a contender source item will itself already be on the way to somewhere else. A colour image of a bicycle
against a white background will suggest age (of the bike and its rider),
gender, an object of desire or use, an environment, and a kind of
cycling (road, mountain, touring).
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Clive Cazeaux
No cycling or bicycles feature in the Doncaster Earth Centre video.

It is a location that has been reached (one assumes) by cycling. The idea
that cycling as art leads to forms (in this case, video) in which objects and
events other than cycling appear is, ironically, highly deconstructionist, in
as much as it enacts diffrance, the action whereby any attempt to privilege or rely heavily upon a term ends up initiating a series of deferrals in
which terms other than the one intended are invoked. It has not been my
intention to apply deconstruction to fine art research in the hope of finding an instance of categorial movement which can be labelled deconstructionist, but it appears we have found one. Turning to another aspect
of the video, it is a sequence which moves around the junkyard area in a
fashion which indicates hand-held camera, suggesting portability. Here,
cycling indirectly informs the mode of representation: rather than selecting an audiovisual form for Ritualride from all the possible forms it could
take, for example, a greater filmic quality, a more overt association with a
film genre appropriate to the story to be told (whatever this might be),
fuller attention paid to establishing the mise en sc ne, the audiovisual
form of the video adheres to what can simply be achieved by editing material obtained from a portable video camera on location.
In applying deconstruction to the Doncaster Earth Centre excerpt
from Ritualride, we have not arrived at a sense of what a piece of deconstructionist art as cycling research might look like. But that was never the
point. In fact, there cannot be a piece of deconstructionist art which embodies or addresses a thesis, I would argue, for that would amount to reducing deconstruction to a style, which could only happen if the deconstruction of our application of categories were suspended in order to
allow for the clustering of properties in a style. (The only exception
might be the possibility of an artistic style that is not a style, but that
must remain the subject of another paper.) Instead, we have identified
that there are two areas where there will be movement between categories: cycling, and the theories of which explain cycling as art. One example of the movement between categories which surrounds cycling is the
appearance of content other than cycling in the Doncaster Earth Centre
video. Furthermore, the hand-held quality of the video is an index of the
importance of portability, of what can be carried by bike. There has not
been time to consider the art histories and theories which expand upon
mechanisms of becoming art, such as, appropriation, defamiliarisation,
institutional baptism, metaphor, performativity, and transformation.
But the fact that cycling itself might perform diffrance must be a contender for further exploration. Given the range of forms which visual
127
art can take, what forms might be given to the places and occasions which
one can reach or enable by cycling? To what extent should these forms be
determined or influenced by what can be carried on a bike? How stable is
transportable by bike as a category, given that it is conceivably possible
to transport anything by bike, given enough riders with trailers and a willingness to break things down to their component parts?
A Habermasian perspective would prompt us to look for mediation
or translation between the aesthetic and the everyday, where this movement is towards the formation of a shared understanding or at least the
conditions for dialogue. But understanding about what? As we have
seen, Ritualride is not an object with a readily identifiable set of properties. It has a variety of forms. If we are going to move from the aesthetic
to the everyday, we need to know the nature and extent of the aesthetic
experience from which we are moving. As I asked in relation to the deconstructive reading of the work: should we look to the stated aims of
the project or work with selected, particular aspects of it? We are placed
in a situation where, because of the multifaceted nature of the work, we
face an array of concepts again: cycling, ecology, wasteland, junk, recycling, failure, encountering others (or not), storytelling (or not), irony,
humour, and hand-held video which make it ambiguous in which direction we should move to approach the conditions for dialogue and to
begin the translation process necessary for dialogue on Habermass terms.
According to Duvenages study of Wellmer, the aesthetic (after Heidegger) discloses a new world by opening viewers to new experiences of
otherness, and disrupting previous fixities.26 This requires the aesthetic to
be an autonomous source of new possibilities, the generator of novel horizons, with its products being translated by discursive reason into terms
which can be incorporated in rational arguments. It is debatable whether
a short piece of hand-held camera footage is sufficiently remote to create
otherness, and whether it is too representational to disrupt any fixities. In
defence of a Wellmerian reading, perhaps being asked to accept a pile of
office interior debris as part of an ecological exhibit provides sufficient
room for an aestheticeveryday translation to take place, on the grounds
that we are poetically invited to see one thing as something else. But this
assumes that analogy can be neatly assigned to the aesthetic side of the
division when it is equally a facet of everyday language. My cycling as
art example has put us in a situation where the boundaries between
the aesthetic and the everyday are blurred. In this respect, we are not
26 Duvenage 2003, 137.
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Clive Cazeaux
too far from Certeaus claim that the everyday invents itself by poaching
in countless ways on the property of others, as in the case of the child
who makes a space for himself on his schoolbook by scrawling on it
in a fashion that is neither accommodated by the books layout nor desired by the schoolteacher.27 In other words, the everyday always reaches
beyond itself so as to prevent itself from becoming a clearly delineated
term in any conceptual mapping exercise.
The fact that Ritualride is being considered in relation to artcycling
as fine art research should offer some guidance though. We are asked to
consider cycling becoming art in virtue of its enabling or opening onto
the other concepts listed above: ecology, wasteland, junk, failure, encountering others, humour, etc. But Habermass aesthetics cannot apply here,
because we are moving from the everyday to the aesthetic, when his project runs in the other direction. Another possibility: rather than trying to
work out how cycling becomes art, we might look instead to what cycling
becomes or makes possible when it is played with, used differently, or manipulated by an artist. This would be a translation which does not move
from the domain of cycling to the domain of art but, rather, uses art as a
motivating force for the translation from cycling to any one or more of
the domains of ecology, wasteland, junk, recycling, failure, etc. We
would be following the response given by the artists group WochenKlausur when asked what makes their interventions in administration, activism and social work art: Art lets us think in uncommon ways, outside
of the narrow thinking of the culture of specialization and outside of the
hierarchies we are pressed into when we are employed in an institution, a
social organization, or a political party.28 For example, in their 1994 95
work Intervention to Aid Drug-Addicted Women, the group invited attorneys, councillors, social workers, and journalists professionally involved
in the cases of drug-addicted women to take boat trips together as occasions where they could speak and listen in ways other than the assertive,
combative, interest-laden modes they felt compelled to adopt in professional contexts. Art here operates neither as a source or target domain
but as a mode of working differently with everyday, public, institutional
officers, systems and concepts.
For my artcycling research, this would function along lines of seeing
what cycling helps to make possible when applied differently, as art. In the
case of Ritualride, the Doncaster Earth Centre excerpt, together with all
27 Certeau 1984, xii, 31.
28 Cited in Kester 2004, 101.
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the projects videos, would be viewed under the heading what cycling can
make possible. The video would not be seen as something in its own
right which has to be translated into the everyday, but as a series of sensory qualities, meanings, and narrative threads which sit at the end of particular extensions of what cycling can become. Interestingly, Habermas as
a philosopher of modernity and WochenKlausur as artists who think in
uncommon ways have the same project challenging specialisation yet
the place of the aesthetic within their mechanisms of contra-specialisation
is different: with Habermas, the aesthetic is in need of cross-categorial
mediation whereas, with WochenKlausur, it is a force injected into existing everyday concepts with the intention of either stretching them or allowing them to realise novel outcomes.
One further act of translation needs to be considered. This will be an
act of translation that is accompanied by the challenging of arguments
and the requirement for evidence which are in keeping with Habermass
demand for recognition of the intersubjective validity of claims. In exploring cycling as art in the context of fine art research, it has to be demonstrated that cycling can be art, it has to be the subject of a knowledge
claim with argument and evidence (and a novel knowledge claim at that,
given that research is a contribution to knowledge). Translation would be
required in the sense that whatever arguments were made for a piece of
cycling becoming art, the theories and other supporting claims used as
premises in the arguments would need spelling out. Cyclings becoming
art would need to be unpacked in terms wider than those used in any
headline or concluding statement to the effect that, in Ritualride (to
stick with our example), it is the injection of the aesthetic into everyday
practices of cycling, site visits and meetings which leads to a series of distinctive, particular events with qualities which would not have come
about were it not for the injection. In other words, the injection thesis
would need explanation. From a Habermasian perspective, we need to
know the status of these unpacked, explanatory statements. Do they
fall within the realm of specialised knowledge, thereby making them as
remote from the everyday as artworks themselves, or will the unpacking
of terms happen to a degree where the layreader can understand the thesis? For whom does the researcher write? Furthermore, according to Habermas, reason working in the interests of social critique and progress must
apply in an everyday context, yet the location of fine art research is primarily university art departments or art schools affiliated to universities.
How are we to assess these in relation to the everyday?
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Clive Cazeaux
Addressing the relation between universities and life outside academia

is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, it is worth observing that
the nature and purpose of universities and their research are under constant scrutiny by governments set on reducing funding to higher education and demanding evidence that research has some perceived, preferably
measurable benefit to society. As regards benefit to society, in the UK,
this has been termed impact within the next research assessment round,
and has been defined as an effect on, change or benefit to the economy,
society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or
quality of life, beyond academia.29 In one sense, impact is hard to take
issue with. Who would want to deny that their research has economic,
social or cultural benefit? One response might be to claim Habermas
as the philosopher of impact, a defender of the requirement that a specialised practice must demonstrate the applicability of its research to a
wider, everyday community. But impact is a far from straightforward notion. What counts as an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality
of life? There is the equally contentious matter of what the evidence of
such effects, changes or benefits might be, that is, how they might be captured and quantified. A benefit to society might be the cultivation of a
criticality which questions any claims driven by economic, instrumentalist thinking. It is not immediately apparent where the impact agenda
leaves the university as a site of critical resistance. For Derrida, the principle of unconditional resistance is a right that the university itself should
at the same time reflect, invent, and pose.30 Ostovich makes a case on
Habermasian grounds for the basis of the universitys value to society
lying in its character as a community of reason, an environment in
which students are encouraged always to have in mind the question
What makes this acceptable? when approaching the utterances of others.31 For now, all that can be indicated is that the division between research and the everyday may not be as strict as we first imagine, albeit
for reasons which are not entirely laudable.
29 Research Excellence Framework 2011, 48.

30 Derrida 2002b, 204.
31 Ostovich 1995, 465.
131
Conclusion
This paper has brought questions of fine art research to bear on the opposition between deconstruction and reconstruction with the intention
of: (a) showing how the opposition can address some of the fine art questions, and (b) providing a context in which the different understandings
of cross-categoriality at work in deconstruction and reconstruction can
operate over and above binary oscillation. One of the problems affecting
the deconstructionreconstruction debate is the oscillation between a
strategy of contradiction, destabilisation, and interruption on the
one hand, and the requirement of the formulation of ideals, principles
and laws in the interests of social and political progress on the other.
Both sides claim social and political efficacy but operate with different
ontologies, including different understandings of the languageworld relation: Derrida maintains a Kantian-informed textuality, whereas Habermas advances a pragmatic epistemological realism which holds that the
truth of a sentence is confirmed by reference to the world, as accessed
and described through our cognitive, linguistic resources. Closer inspection of their ontologies in relation to aesthetics reveals that both attach
importance to cross-categoriality, but understand it differently. With Derrida, it is thoroughgoing or infinite because of the ultimate contingency
of all categories, whereas, with Habermas, it is translated or mediated
across realms of discourse.
Applying this difference in the understanding of cross-categoriality to
fine art research has allowed the difference to be articulated in some novel
ways. We have learned how the deconstructionreconstruction opposition can operate in relation to a particular fine art research project and
artwork. Deconstructive and reconstructive philosophies have different
outcomes when applied to Ounanians Ritualride, and in particular the
Doncaster Earth Centre excerpt. A deconstructive reading focuses on
the movement between categories surrounding cycling and the theories
which explain cycling as art, whereas a reconstructive perspective runs
into difficulties because the aestheticeveryday distinction cannot be
maintained. In addition, the array of concepts at work in the Earth Centre video from cycling and ecology, through junk and failure, to irony
and hand-held video makes it ambiguous in which direction we should
move to approach the conditions for dialogue and to begin the translation
process necessary for dialogue on Habermass terms. However, the fact
that cycling as art occurs within the context of fine art research means
that any technicalities surrounding the aestheticeveryday distinction as
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Clive Cazeaux
it applies to cycling as art will require unpacking into broader, explanatory terms, and these may be more open to intersubjective validation.
What about the aim of this book: to see whether the deconstructionreconstruction contest might be located within a new sensibility?
The fine art context, under the research imperative of it not being on
its own but contributing to knowledge, has provided a new perspective
on the different resistances at work in the deconstructionreconstruction
opposition. Rather than having them remain in a state of oscillation along
an axis of undecidability versus mediation, fine art research encounters
them in a variegated field of cross-categorial movement. This is a field
rather than an axis because the distinctions which formerly arranged undecidability and mediation as a binary do not apply in a fine art research
context. Undecidability and mediation will still occur, but instead of having to commit to either undecidability or mediation, perceiving and reflecting upon art as research are processes which require a greater flexibility of movement. Because of the multifaceted nature of Ounanians Ritualride, we faced an array of concepts which made it ambiguous in which
direction we should move to begin making a conceptual or declarative
commitment. However, the fact that this was occurring in a research context, with a line of enquiry which obliged us to use concepts and make
claims, meant competing theories would be drawn upon but none
could be taken as the home or final theory on account of the deconstructive challenge to any notion of a fully-present fit between concept
and object. The idea that undecidability and mediation might enjoy a relationship other than opposition is signaled by the fact that the concepts
and claims which we are obliged to use are steps towards Habermass requirement of mediation between the aesthetic and the everyday. Except
here the mediation is between the theories integral to the art as research
process; with Ritualride, this would occur between theories of becoming
art.
The idea that fine art practice has to be answerable to analysis from a
range of theories and research methods is consistent with a Habermasian
move away from art for arts sake to a series of more worldly, discursive
forms. Craig-Martin and the danger of distortion may not find favour
here, since their arguments for arts validity being defined wholly on
the terms of the art world, and in terms of art for arts sake, meet
head-on Habermass requirement for arts commitment to the lifeworld.
It would also appear that, as far as Habermas is concerned, research
would not distort art practice but subject it to the methodological, argumentative and discursive requirements of research, and transform it by
133
redirecting it towards a wider set of worldly concerns. Against this, however, it cannot be assumed that art as research necessarily fulfils the mediation between autonomous art and everyday life which Habermas
wants. The principal environment for fine art research is the university,
including exhibitions in university galleries and publications in fine art
research journals. However, questions of style put to the researcher,
such as For whom do you write? and Which idioms do you adopt?,
and tensions surrounding the notions of economic, social and cultural
impact indicate that the division between specialist and lay literature is
not necessarily an impermeable one. How one conceptualises and assesses
such permeability must remain the subject for another study.
It could be argued I can only claim this non-oppositional field of
cross-categoriality for fine art research because I am not situating it overtly in relation to reconstructive projects of social progress and political
emancipation. The opposition is bound to disappear, the criticism
would run, because the heart of the matter the tension between art
and politics has been removed. Except it hasnt. The first half of my
chapter has shown that deconstructive and reconstructive aesthetics understand the tension between art and politics in terms of two competing
notions of cross-categoriality. The second half of my chapter has shown
that that fine art research manipulates cross-categoriality in ways which
depart from opposition. But doesnt this ultimately muddy the issue, leaving us in a state where we do not have a clear-cut answer to the question:
how does fine art research make a difference to the deconstructionreconstruction opposition? What kind of texts, objects or events would be introduced to enact these non-oppositional states?
But such questions cannot be taken at face value. They demand examples along the lines of What would it look like?, What form
would it take?, but the forms of encounter adopted would themselves
be at issue in terms of the categories they invoke, and the possibilities
of cross-categorial movement which may arise. It has to be remembered
that, for both Derrida and Habermas, they are working in the Kantian
and Heideggerian traditions which take concepts all the way down to
the shape or textuality or structure of experience, including the shape
of events which might realise non-oppositional, aesthetico-political
forms. Ultimately, to adopt the terms of my fine art example, the
forms that a cycling-as-art event takes would form part of the research
programme, because the transitions from claim to artistic form and
vice versa would themselves be two fundamental cases of cross-categorial
movement in need of evaluation. What these forms might be must re-
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Clive Cazeaux
main the subject of future study of deconstructivereconstructive aesthetics and fine art research. The point is simply to meet the charge of muddied waters by explaining that the muddiness is a consequence of the departure from the razor-sharp but ultimately unproductive, oscillationgenerating clarity of binary division, and that the mutually informative
relations between deconstructivereconstructive aesthetics and fine art research demonstrated here are the first steps towards outlining a practice
whose business it might be to realise new forms of aesthetico-political encounter.
Towards a Dramaturgy of Suspicion:

Theatre and Myths in 20th-century France
Franca Bruera
In memory of Christa Wolf
In 1956 Natalie Sarraute published a study with the emblematic title

Lre du soupon,1 in which the author proclaimed the urgent need for
a revolution in writing, inspired by the definitive supercession of canons
and of traditional conventions. The study, which consists of four articles
published between 1949 and 1955, invites the reader to enter into the socalled era of suspicion, through the filter of a new way of conceiving textual strategies: not merely a terrain dentente, but a place of mfiance
rciproque and terrain dvast, in which the author and the reader
would finally be able to confront one another.2
Though the category of the masters of suspicion was formulated in
1969 by Paul Ricoeur to identify the inventors of a new art of interpretation within the contemporary philosophical context,3 the dimensions
of doubt, of uncertainty, and of diffidence, as Sarraute asserts, were
evoked as early as the end of the 1940s and made nearly official in France
by writings both theoretical and otherwise of a mainly literary variety
which attempted to offer instructions for a new use of the existent forms
of communication: La vie mode demploi 4 within its very title shows the
1
2
3
4
Sarraute 1956.
Sarraute 1956, 62 63.
Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud are the masters of suspicion
that Paul Ricoeur identifies in order to position hermeneutics within the context
of the philosophical reflections of the 20th century. See Ricoeur 1969.
A novel by Georges Prec, published in 1978, whose characteristics are synthesised in chapter 26: Imaginons un homme dont la fortune naurait dgale que
lindiffrence ce que la fortune permet gnralement, et dont le dsir serait,
beaucoup plus orgueilleusement, de saisir, de dcrire, dpuiser, non la totalit
du monde projet que son seul nonc suffit ruiner mais un fragment constitu de celui-ci: face linextricable incohrence du monde, il sagira alors daccomplir jusquau bout un programme, restreint sans doute, mais entier, intact,
irrductible. Perec 1978, 152.
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spirit of experimentation that the era of suspicion had cultivated during

these years.
Literature from the postwar era is punctuated, in fact, by numerous
challenges that stress the need to make sure that readers recognise the urgency of this new literature: one only needs to look at the paratextual
threshold of these writings to find it. From the famous question posed
by Sartre in 1947, Quest-ce que la littrature?, which calls into question
both writing in its social function and the writer in situation,5 to the experience of isolation and of solitude of Maurice Blanchot, elaborated in
1955 by way of the question O
va la littrature?,6 the dimensions of
doubt and of uncertainty force themselves upon the attention of artists
and writers in their functions as aesthetic parameters and essential keys
of interpretation, confirming one of the most evident traits of modernity:
its nature is both self-referential and self-critical.
These are merely a few crucial examples7 of a fertile theoretical activity that developed by delving into its roots in a postwar period of social,
political, economic and cultural reconstruction that underwent, from an
artistic and literary point of view, a veritable crisis of representation. This
was a crisis to which the theatres, those that presented spectacles of a
mythic nature, amply testified starting in the 1920s, bringing to light a
large part of that culture of suspicion that would become its legacy to
the deconstructive sensibility and which would eventually make the desire
to destroy, to decompose, to fragment and to sow the seeds of doubt the
basis of literary-philosophical reflection for a large part of the second half
of the 20th century.
The following study is intended as an intervention into the debate
about deconstruction with the principal intention of recognising the
dual force of myths as they were represented onstage: it is both normative
and destructive at the same time, conscious of the principle of the dialectical correlation between the deconstructive experience and the reconstructive thought of the 20th century.
From their first reworkings in the 20th century, myths seem able to
settle and to facilitate their sense by way of an extraordinary and uncommon capacity to power themselves thanks to an ever stronger narrative
5
6
7
Sartre 1964.
Blanchot 1959.
To these can be added by way of example the various forms of suspicion formulated by Alain Robbe-Grillet (see Robbe-Grillet 1963), as well as the interrogations of Julien Gracq (see Gracq 1961), and of Bernard Nol (see Nol 1997).
Dramaturgy of Suspicion: Theatre and Myths in 20th-century France
137
potential, this in turn is favoured by the dialectical process of desemanticisation and resemanticisation which the myths themselves produce. The
examples to be discussed in our study will elucidate the specificity of this
intrinsic polarity of myths. Independently of the outcomes of the diverse
rewritings, of which we will show a few models, it seems possible, in fact,
to recognise during the 20th century a marked tendency to overcome the
traditional acceptance of myth as mere repetition as a result of its renovated conception within the dialectical framework of deconstruction/reconstruction.8
The first point to underline is that the quite diffuse tendency in
France from the end of the First World War to deconsecrate the great
myths of antiquity, seen for the most part in the theatre, is much akin
to the progressive erosion of those parameters and traditional conventions
that had always preserved the uniqueness of the work of art. The massive
movement toward a general revisitation of myths corresponds perfectly to
the historical/cultural crisis that the accelerations and radical transformations of the short 20th century had inevitably engendered.9 The idea of
myth, in fact, became involved in that progressive cultural projection
of the crises of history, of the fragmentation of language and of speech,
of the end of the work of art as a finished product resolved in and of
itself. Myth, in the end, is a key factor within the critical debate over
the 20th-century crisis of Cartesian self-evidence.
Within this context, the sheer number of works from the first half of
the 20th century that have a mythical subject is evidenced by the extreme
degree of porosity that the myths bear for the first time in history. Having
overcome the traditional understanding of myth as an archetypal model
of inertia, of stability, and of restoration or repetition of the sacred period
of their origin, over time these myths assume an increasingly marked
function as a generative and dynamic model, in that myth is not an
idle tale, but a hard worked active force.10 As will be demonstrated shortly, it is the theatre that brings the myth onto the scene as a vehicle for the
transmission of the twofold stance of 20th-century thought and criticism,
in that it shares both the specificity of the deconstructive and demystifying gesture that was inaugurated by the masters of suspicion and the
more specifically reconstructive instances of contemporary reflection.
8 For more on the debate on the dialectic polarity of deconstruction and reconstruction, see Lingua/Martinengo 2010.
9 Hobsbawm 1994.
10 Malinowski 1954, 101.
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Within artistic and literary society it was this reflection, beginning at the
end of the First World War, which contrasted the reordering force of narration to the crisis of subjectivity and of writing in general.
During the period between the end of the First World War and the
end of the 1940s there was, and not only in France, a large-scale reappearance on the literary scene of paradigmatic mythic models which provide interesting examples of the overthrow of traditional readings that
had conventionally been applied to them. From Cocteaus Antigone,
which in 1922 prematurely launched the program of formal restoration
known as the rappel lordre, to Anouilhs Mde (1946), a dense tragedy
replete with the motives of incommunicability and of the insufficiency of
speech, the myth seems to rise both to a symbolic and privileged space
and to a hermeneutic standard. This new status was acquired by means
of the dialogical dimension which vitalises the myths themselves as well
as for their capacity to harmonise with modern events and to measure dialectically against their own traditions. The many examples that one can
find in French poetry, prose, and especially in dramaturgy from those
years do not set themselves up as conventional ways of revisiting an ancestral and collective space within the automatic mechanism of its reprise;
rather, they appear to be key moments in the search for poetic modalities
and for new aesthetics which, taken together, identify within the myths a
new referential horizon of a fertile, dynamic and innovative nature.
From the last years of the 19th century onwards, myths became a
point of convergence for literary, religious, anthropological, psychoanalytical, ethnological, and philosophical experiences while, as far as the more
strict relationship between myth and literature is concerned, the beginning of the 1930s saw the first studies on mythanalyse, inaugurated by
Denis de Rougemont in his famous study LAmour et lOccident (1939).
Myth, from the end of the First World War, falls within the dynamic
of an ample debate taking place among various fields of study, not the
least of which is linguistics. From the simple forms of Andr Jolles
through the more thorough studies of Emile Benveniste and Roman Jakobson this science announced the specificity of a language that was starting to declare itself in crisis. As mute as the sirens of Kafka and Beckett
that Ulysses can no longer hear, language presents all the characteristics of
a modernity that moves attention away from the content and towards the
methods and the codes of communication. If T. S. Eliot, as early as 1923,
signals the importance of comparing the archaic and the modern in Joyce
139
speaking in terms of a mythic model11 it seems possible to underline

the epistemological value of myth which in the first half of the century
seems to relate more and more, as far as method is concerned, to scientific knowledge. The potential of myth to form an investigative path
marks a change in aesthetic consciousness, recognising in it a certain rigour and identifying it as der Mythos ist kein Kontext, sondern ein Rahmen, innerhalb dessen interpoliert werden kann.12 We are presented,
then, with a scenario that is circumscribable, flexible and fertile that enriches and is enriched by different meanings based on the various configurations in which it finds itself involved.
The first theatrical rewritings of myths date to the prolific French climate of the 1920s and signal a radical change in aesthetic experience
compared to the first two decades of a century that is notoriously dominated by the iconoclasm of the historic avant-gardes. Myth, having overcome romantic titanism, profaned and reduced to a putrid carcass of
Baudelairian memory,13 inserts itself with difficulty, though dynamically,
in the dialectical process of incontro-scontro with the tradition launched
by the avant-gardes, thus sustaining its own vital force within the new
myths that celebrate historicity, through its sense of bricolage,14 and in virtue of its intrinsic analogical weight.
Immediately after the First World War, in parallel with a more cautious relationship with historicity, to an ever more accurate reflection of
historic sense15 and of the concept of duration inspired by Bergson,16 the
possibility of communicating the world seems more and more remote
and problematic. In this climate, myth, understood as an opening onto
possible other worlds that transcend the defined limits of our actual
world, seems to offer literature the opportunity to draw from a fertile narrative material, already on the one hand guarantor of universal categories
and on the other, in its very nature a lack of fixedness and its metamorphoses and oscillations, a great source of stimuli for the production of
new meanings.
11 Eliot 1923, 480 483.

12 A frame within which interpolations can be added. Blumenberg 1971, 51 (my
translation).
13 Cf. in particular Curi 1996, 3 39.
14 Lvi-Strauss 1996. This important aspect is underlined by Curi 1996, 155 161.
15 Eliot 2001, 392 402. The reference is to Tradition and Individual Talent (1919).
16 Curi 1996, 171.
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Myth, just as Paul Ricoeur asserted in Finitude et culpabilit,17 thus

returns in the 20th century in virtue of its capacity to configure itself as
a possible new set of norms and values.18 Nous racontons des histoires
parce que finalement les vies humaines ont besoin et mritent dtre racontes, as Ricoeur likewise asserted in Temps et rcit. 19 In literary text
with a mythical setting, this specificity, which is strictly connected to a
general desire to reconstruct, combines with characteristics that are apparently contrary and destabilising: myth, as Marguerite Yourcenar writes in
her lectre ou la chute des masques (1954), is ultimately a sort of admirable ch que en blanc sur lequel chaque po te tour de r le peut se permettre dinscrire le chiffre qui lui convient.20 It therefore conserves its
structure as a model of normativity and regenerates itself in essence by
way of a process of desanctification which manifests itself, according to
modalities that are always different, through its own deconstruction. In
the end, the identity of the myth, as Derrida might argue, does not
seem to be per se in the 20th century, but is rather something that can
be determined only in relation to something else, as differing from itself.21
If Jean Giraudoux, Jean Cocteau, Jean Giono and other authors were
able to construct some of the most original re-readings of the ancient
myths this was only by disregarding the linearity of historic time and
the solemnity and the authority of the various mythical figures as well
as by interweaving plots constructed on the basis of alchemical associations. The absurd death of Agamemnon at the edge of a pool (in Giraudouxs lectre, 1937),22 the ill-concealed nymphomania of Jocasta (in
Cocteaus La Machine infernale, 1934),23 the prosaic utterances of a
lying and do-nothing Ulysses (in Gionos Naissance de lOdysse,
1930),24 the foolishness of the young Paris (in Giraudouxs La guerre de
Troie naura pas lieu, 1935),25 to limit ourselves to but a few of the paradigmatic examples, even while demystifying, parodying, and desanctifying the classical myths, do not translate a necessity to destroy either
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
Ricur 2009.
Martinengo 2008b.
Ricur 1983, 143.
Yourcenar 1971, II, 19.
Derrida 1967b.
Giraudoux 1982.
Cocteau 2003.
Giono 1971.
Giraudoux 1982.
141
good taste or common sense, nor do they perpetuate the profanation of

the sanctity of the myth, la Baudelaire. Rather, they overcome the limit
of an instrumental interpretation or use of the myth understood as a
vehicle of founding values and therefore used for its marble fixedness
empirically translating the intuitions of T. S. Eliot concerning myth as
a method of interpretation and as a cognitive investigative tool that is
able to render the modern world accessible to art.26
No longer the champion of universal and immutable values, now the
receptacle of particular fragments and ever-changing, the mythological
material began to accommodate new content and to participate in a critical dialogue both with its own past and with the present in which it
began to be used, assigning in this way a decidedly surprising meta-literary character to the different rewritings.
No longer to recognise but to interpret, no longer cultivated as a medium of homogeneous, consistent, monolithic meaning but understood
as an accumulation of citations and analogies which, through a process
of dissemination, can be pieced together in different ways, myth is subjected to the tastes of the reader/spectator. For Cocteau it is possible to
re-read Sophocless Antigone only by flying over Greece in an airplane:
A vol doiseau, de grandes beauts disparaissent, dautres surgissent; il se
forme des rapprochements, des blocs, des ombres, des angles, des reliefs
inattendus. Peut-tre mon exprience est-elle un moyen de faire vivre les
vieux chefs duvre. A force dy habiter nous les contemplons distraitement,
mais parce que je survole un texte cl bre, chacun croit lentendre pour la
premi re fois.27
In this way the poet draws from myth in its sense of a system in permanent revision, proposing to the public an adaptation of Antigone which is
both faithful to Sophocless model and a revisiting of the form, beginning
with the telegraphic recitation28 modelled on the verbal duel,29 then concerning the costumes, the scenery, and the music, entrusted respectively
to Coco Chanel, Pablo Picasso and Arthur Honegger, not to mention
the dialectic between ancient and modern that transforms the disobedience of Antigone into an act of anarchy.
26 Eliot 1923, 483.
27 Cocteau 2003, 305.
28 Lextrme vitesse de laction nempche pas les acteurs darticuler beaucoup e de
remuer peu. Le Chur et le coryphe se rsument en une voix qui parle tr s haut
et tr s vite comme si elle lisait un article de journal. Cocteau 2003, 307.
29 Antigone et Cron se parlent de tout pr s; leurs fronts se touchent. Cocteau
2003, 313.
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Caught up in the spinning wheels of modernity, the phenomenon of

the rewriting of myths in France is inscribed in the search for new expressive forms, in the vein of a recouping of the communicative power of the
word that the recourse to myths can, perhaps, guarantee. On a thematicexpressive level such a search shows itself through a general loss of depth
and centrality of the mythical figures that are used, often at the very limit
of aphasia as is the case of Cousteaus Orpheus or, on the contrary,
through the loss of meaningful speech, as seemingly represented by Gionos Ulysses or Anouilhs Medea. Meanwhile myth, repository of sense
within a new frame, transfuses contents, is renovated in form and accedes
to a new mode of signification within an intertextual and stratified rewriting which, just like myth itself, becomes a dynamic model of infinite
connections and possibilities of re-production.30 It is in this capacity to
reconstruct and resemanticise itself that myth translates that unequivocal
polarity that identifies itself in the deconstructive and reconstructive
thought of the 20th century.31 In its intrinsic nature as a story myth according to a prospective reading that is either Ricoeurian or reconstructive is the champion and reconstructor of sense, independently of its
possible dead ends and its aversion to any form of all encompassing
truth, unambiguous or objective as it may be, which would be unacceptable in the 20th-century context in which it is positioned.
Among the works that most explicitly convey the dialectical process
of desemanticisation and concurrent resemanticisation of myth, we will
now focus on Orphe by Jean Cocteau which, within the physical space
of the scene a privileged place of the semiotic transfusion of the
myth celebrates the encounter between the demystifying gesture and
the reconstructive operation, all within the framework of an original
backwards reading of myth.
Cocteau brings to the stage an Orpheus who, already in Act I, is presented to the audience metaphorically dismembered, decomposed, in
pieces, as he is deprived of the generative capacity that the legend had
attributed to him. Inconsolable and conscious both of the crises of poetic
sensibility and of his own intellectual aridity, Orpheus seems to be suffocated to the point of aphasia, infertile and sterile, just as his dialogues
30 For a more in depth approach to the motive of the re-production of the myths,
see my study Bruera 2008, 549 560.
31 Ferry 1996.
143
with Eurydice suggest.32 The originality of the play is found in its structure, which on the one hand seems to interrogate the quest for mythical
unity and stability while on the other it accompanies the new Orpheus
down a tortuous path of the retrieval of the lost word and along the
long walk of the progressive reconstitution of his own fragments. Starting out from the metaphorical meaning of the myth me of dismemberment, Cocteau leads Orpheus towards the discovery of his very identity;
deprived of his generative capacity, the character draws the resources required to regenerate himself from the narrative material of the myth,
while also regenerating and reconstructing the sense. In this way Cocteau
founds his aesthetic experience both upon the value of persistence and on
the porosity of the mythological material: through the demystification of
the characters all of whom are incomplete and capable only of an understanding of the world that is both relative and defective and through
the desemanticisation of the message that is actualised and standardised
through language, the new Orpheus offers the possibility to think
about a return of the myth: this time revisited in terms of the capacity
to translate both the insufficiency of any conservative interpretation
and, perhaps more importantly, its meaning as a productive dimension
with re-compositional and reconstructive capacities.
If Orpheus is born again from his own ashes and begins his existence
from the end, Jean Gionos Ulysses is reborn paradoxically from his
character as Nobody and through the power of the narrative, which confirms once again the reconstructive meaning of myth when he is subjected to a series of upheavals. In his condition as different from himself , or
32 To explain briefly, the following is one of the opening dialogues of the work:
Eurydice. Orphe, mon po te Regarde comme tu es nerveux depuis ton
cheval. Avant tu riais, tu membrassais, tu me berais; tu avais une situation superbe. Tu tais charg de gloire, de fortune. Tu crivais des po mes quon sarrachait et que toute la Thrace rcitait par cur. Tu glorifiais le soleil. Tu tais son
prtre, et un chef. Mais depuis le cheval tout est fini. Nous habitons la campagne.
Tu as abandonn ton poste et tu refuses dcrire. Ta vie se passe dorloter ce
cheval, interroger ce cheval, esprer que ce cheval va te rpondre. Ce nest
pas srieux.
Orphe. Pas srieux? Ma vie commenait se faisander, tre point, puer la
russite et la mort. Je mets le soleil et la lune dans le mme sac. Il me reste la nuit.
Et pas la nuit des autres. Ma nuit. Ce cheval entre dans ma nuit et il en sort
comme un plongeur. Il en rapporte des phrases. Ne sens-tu pas que la moindre
de ces phrases est plus tonnante que tous les po mes? Je donnerais mes uvres
compl tes pour une seule de ces petites phrases o
je mcoute comme on coute
la mer dans un coquillage. Pas srieux? Cocteau 2003, 391 392.
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as other, Ulysses reveals himself by lying, which in the Naissance de

lOdysse acts as much as a fil rouge as a mechanism for bringing both
sides of the myth face to face: those of the original and eternal versus
those of the merely derivative.33 Myth, presented with anti-sublime characteristics, puts Ulyssess legendary charm and prodigious ability as a
mendacious narrator to the service of the narrative, celebrating the transitory aspect and the vitality of a word which has become paradoxically
unofficial, ambiguous and blasphemous.34 Nevertheless, Ulyssess lies
fly from one person to another and in their germination and diffusion
are transformed into official doctrine mythical though it may be
which is recognised by the masses. And it is precisely on this dialectical
contrast between the monologue-heavy epic material and the need for
dialogue inherent in the narrative structure of the piece that Naissance
de lOdysse is formed. In this light the novel becomes an acute meta-narrative operation, played out using the extraordinary generative potential
of mythic language, confirming the diffuse return of an interest in the traditional forms of communication and sharing of meaning.
These are just a few examples taken from a rich patrimony of rewritings of myths that come from the 1920s, to which one might add the
ample selection of mythic figures that were revisited in the 1930s: the
Atreids, Oedipus, and quite a few reworkings of the myth of Medea,35
taken up again in the 1940s and 1950s by Sartre, Anouilh and Camus,
principally, within the framework of a search focused on questioning,
by use of the mythic model, the intersubjectivity and the dialogical exchange that are at the origins of individuality. If Antigone is the emblem
of the paroxysm of conflicts, Medea reaches into the universality of her
tradition in order to free herself from the mythic spell which locked
her into the static image of the jealous woman, witch and child killer.36
In keeping with a theatre ignorant of psychological mechanisms,
33 Durand 1996, 87.
34 Jai jur le nom des dieux? Je me suis ml leur vie terrible! Pourquoi? Le
mensonge surgit par morceaux horribles devant lesquels il trembla. Jai attir
leur il sur moi!.. tais-je pas bien cach dans les herbes? Je les ai dfis par
le dard de ma langue, puis jai clam mon nom vers eux, comme un couillon!
Plus il rflchissait, plus il se sentait prisonnier de son mensonge, comme un bcheron dont la main est prise dans la fente referme dun tronc. Giono 1971,
37.
35 On this subject, see Ruiz 1982.
36 Anouilh 1967. The reference is to Antigone (1942) and Mde (1946).
145
Orestes37 leaves the responsibility of his actions completely to the act itself and to the spoken word; in so doing he gives the myth the possibility
of contributing to the exploration of shared situations within the compass
of human experience and to affirming an intensely existentialist outlook
with regard to human rights and values.
In the second half of the 20th century, closely following a hybridisation and a mixing of experiences and values, myth is also deeply characterised by extreme variety and difference. As an example one can look to
the Orpheus of Olivier Py,38 an anti-genealogical model, as Gilles Deleuze might put it, of a rewriting that proceeds by way of variation, expansion: conqute, capture, piqre.39 In the same way as those models that
preceded it, the Orpheus of Olivier Py takes shape within the economy of
an intertextual and stratified writing that, just like myth itself, becomes a
dynamic model of infinite connections and inexhaustible possibilities of
reproduction. In conformity with the myth as it was handed down by antiquity, Pys Orpheus was torn to pieces by the Bacchae yet still perseveres
in his song, gaining the attention of a sculptor who sets his face down in
stone. Orpheus, who lies as a cadaver in the laboratory of the artisan,
wakes up, summoned in his own right by the power of the word of
the person who is searching for him. Having disrobed, he undertakes a
long journey through the various places of individual and collective
memory. Among archaeologists, searchers of corpses, alienated people
and professors, the strands of the plot of the myth of Orpheus interweave, called forth allusively or in fragments, initiating a critical dialogue
with those universal categories of which the myth is the champion and
holder.
The model of revisitation seen above, ascribable to the last years of
the 20th century, constitutes further confirmation of the bipolarity that
myth has retained throughout the entire century. The regenerative
force that Antonin Artaud attributed to it, its function as an escape
route from the theatrical dead ends that Eug ne Ionesco saw in it, and
its responsibility to undergo renovation in order to translate the urgency
of the word that Claude Ber, Hubert Colas and other contemporary authors stressed, all help to confirm the extent to which mythical material
continues to conserve its meaning as a widely shared symbolic space and
37 Sartre 2005. The reference is to Les Mouches (1943).
38 Py 1997.
39 Deleuze/Guattari 1980, 30.
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hermeneutic sphere. Guilty of impatience,40 Pys Orpheus negates and at

the same time affirms his mythic origins and in so doing or rather, in so
saying, in contradicting himself and in deconstructing himself in a continuous oscillation between reality and illusion he translates the crisis of
the 20th-century subject. But at the same time, in his oracular function,
Orpheus is the incarnation of the saving power of the word which constructs meaning, which reclaims its speculative nature and which, in recouping its ancestral mythic patrimony, finds its inspiration. Myth, therefore, as a discovery and reconstruction of the word in a contest of moral
atony,41 that of postmodernism and deconstruction which, combined in
different ways and variously wound together, have translated not only the
absence of any direction that might indicate the possibility of arriving at a
greater truth, but also the lack of any projects that might fulfil the function of a compass for the human journey.
With the definition of myth understood as a space in which there are
masses that attract and repel each other, Paul Ricoeur saw properties within the mythic constructions that are analogous to those found in a gravitational field that has been disturbed by forces in continuous dialectical
movement.42 The importance of Ricoeurs reflections has persuaded us to
begin a search, within the framework of studying theatrical literature of a
mythic character written in the 20th century, which confronts myth in its
generative, constructive, and dynamic potential as well as in its trans-temporal classic fixity.
For this reason, the models of rewriting that we have proposed in this
study must be considered empirical evidence of an investigation which
has an ambitious, but necessary, task. I aim to identify interpretative parameters that permit the study of a highly diffuse phenomenon of rewriting in the 20th century. I will attempt as well to overcome those often incomplete perspectives of reading that, in order to explain the rush to revisit the classical myths, use terms such as imitation, parody, secondgrade literature or, more generally, talk about them as second-hand
works.43
To explain the contemporary space one would say that, beginning
with Jean Cocteau and moving on to the works of Olivier Py, the aesthetic of mythical representation has been called into question through a di40
41
42
43
See Blanchot 1955.

I have borrowed the definition of moral atony from Segre 2005.
Ricoeur 2009, 527.
See Compagnon 1979; Genette 1982.
147
alectical process of demystification and a contemporaneous appropriation

of the mythological material shorn of the sacredness of its original treatment and reconstructed in the uncertain present of writing. And on the
basis of the dynamic connection between the constitutive elements of
myth and new elements inserted into it in the last century, of the desemanticisation and resemanticisation of the characters and the events already codified in antiquity and the break with logical consequences of
the events in question, the act of rewriting myth in the 20th century
has become an important instrument in reading, identifying, receiving
and above all revisiting cultural models. The 20th century has infused
myth with a new energy, not by reclaiming the sacredness that it lost in
the face of the deconstructive emergence of modernity, but rather by seeing in myth a substantial component of reconstruction and revision. In
the wake of the increasing popular interest that the new sciences have invested in myth, mainly regarding its repetitive aspects and widely understood as a dialectical moment, literature and theatre have drawn inspiration for their conception of myth as a basis for a new beginning: myth
has become a new form of dialogue and of textual polyphony, translating
the need for a substantial renewal of writing as well as the increasingly
lively interest in its own polymorphic and synthetic nature.
A Methodological Comparison between a

Mythocentric Approach and a Deconstructive Reading
in the Interpretation of Rewritings
Rewritings of myths appear to the reader and critic as anomalous textual
objects. The nature of these texts seems to push to paroxysm the interpretive conflict between a reading that assumes the total autonomy of the
text arguing with Jacques Derrida and the textualism of the Yale school
that il ny a pas dhors-texte, through the extreme aporistic consequences
in Stanley Fish and an interpretation that, on the other hand, accesses
the text only by means of a dialogue with an extra-text, not conceived just
in terms of the historical, cultural or ideological context, but as an intertextual network of theme and myth. 1
Unlike any other text, a rewriting has the peculiarity of alluding to a
rfrence with which it explicitly demands a comparison. This reference
can be conceived in two different ways. On the one hand, it could be interpreted as internal to the very same text, that is, according to Derrida,
like an alterity that is always greffe, duplicated, like a diffrance. 2 Or, on
the other hand as is the case for readings like those in thematic criticism, mythanalyse and mythocritique 3 this reference could be understood
as a narrative hors-texte which is manifest in the text. This second perspective is that which we will identify as the mythocentric approach. Both of
these readings are exposed to certain criticisms, given the fact that, as
1
2
As Pierre Brunel states, for the very status of anteriority that characterises them,
the myths are outside of the text. [] They are pre-texts, but also Hors-textes.
Brunel 1992, 59.
It does not suspend reference to history, to the world, to reality, to being, and
especially, not to the other, since to say of history, of the world, of reality, that
they always appear in an experience, hence in a movement of interpretation
which contextualizes them according to a network of differences and hence of referral to the other, is surely to recall that alterity (difference) is irreducible. Derrida 1988a, 137.
I leave the terms mythanalyse and mythocritique in French here and throughout as no comprehensive translation of the texts by Gilbert Durand and Pierre
Brunel (nor of those inspired by their approaches) currently exist.
150
Grard Genette has illustrated in his Palimpseste, rewriting is presented as

a literature in the second degree and the interpretation of a text in the
second degree cannot be set apart from a comparison to the first. The relationship with this first degree upon which the text is built can be expressed and detected precisely as is the case with what Genette defines
as hypotexte or else it can be evoked in a generic reference that alludes to
a culturally-shared repertoire, often defined as tradition, as is the case
with that which is often defined as literary myth. In any case, this
first degree which precedes the text is neither a dispensable element,
since a comparison is demanded by the text itself, nor interpretable as
a neutral sign, since it is claimed by virtue of its connection, often
with the past, more often still with the mythical past, of a primordial era.
Therefore, the location of this textual space, hors or dans le texte,
becomes a crucial junction for approaching the reading of a rewriting.
Yet, it is not altogether clear what influence this interlocution has upon
the work. Especially problematic are the cases where this comparison is
not reduced to a relationship between two works, but between the present
text and a whole legacy of stratified references. In other words, it seems
possible to highlight two irreconcilable perspectives: a reading that accords perspectival priority to the myth, recognising it as an essence that
precedes and includes the second text (hence the notion of mythocentric
approach); and, a second reading that accords perspectival priority to the
text, and which recognises the text as the primary object and starting
point of its own interpretation. This second perspective could correspond
to the purely deconstructive approach that denies the straightforward
availability of sense and rejects any attempt to constrain the infinite openness of the sign as an ideological fault. The result is a praxis that encourages an interpretative productivity and a reading of the text which is freely available to the intentio lectoris.
In what follows, we will discuss the limits of both the mythocentric
and the deconstructive approach to the process of rewriting. In the first
section, we will try to demonstrate that mythocritique, mythanalyse and
thematic criticism share a deep and implicit methodological assumption,
considering myth in an essentialist way, and the process of rewriting as
itself deriving from a certain idea of myth. In order to criticise this essentialist approach, we will use some conceptual instruments of deconstruction, which contrast with the metaphysical drift of myth-perspective. Then, in the second section, we will cast doubt upon the drastic
consequences of a deconstructive reading in the interpretation of rewritings. We will show how rewriting, as resemantisation, implies a recon-
A Methodological Comparison
151
struction of sense, which deconstruction explicitly disincentivises, if not

frustrates, leaving rewriting text without the identification of its double
nature.
1. The limits of mythocentric approaches

The frequency of the return to the archaic (Andr Siganos) and to the
mythical and tragic figures of Greek classicism has caused many critics
to recognise a continuity and even an identity in some re-evoked figures such as Antigone, Medea and Oedipus. The reference to mythical
characters, suggested explicitly by rewriting, is inescapable, just as the ancestral echo that is evoked in virtue of an ancient genealogy has to be acknowledged. Undoubtedly, it is the long-lived vitality of mythical figures
that has led many critics to define this reappearance as perenniality, permanence, tradition. The difficulty of distinguishing that which is inherited from that which is elaborated and new in a rewriting, therefore, has
often strained the critical approach between the oppressive dichotomies
of perenniality and usury (Gilbert Durand), permanence and transformation (Eva Kuschner), tradition and creation (Raymond Trousson),
and between the still more thorny myth, literary myth (Pierre Albouy)
and literized myth (Siganos). This dual tension has raised a veritable anthology of critical readings, among which the most successful are precisely
mythanalyse, mythocritique and thematic criticism.
All these oxymoronic couplings as dynamic tensions between an
inclusive macrosystem (that of the universal, of the myth) and the rewriting (its empirical and particular precipitate, as a variant of a transcendent model) betray a common perspectival positioning, decentred with respect to the text, that aims to recognise a perennial dimension outside of the text, but that is co-extensive with it. Roman Racine
recently defined the critical attitude, which recognises a permanent dimension in rewriting, as deductive idealism,4 and Alain Deremetz
designates it as a metaphysical and ontological plane.5 This approach
could be identified as a mythocentric reading. Although mythanalyse,6
4
5
6
Cf. Racine 2006, 37.

Deremetz 1994, 16 17.
Gilbert Durand, theorist of mythanalyse, conceives the existence of the myth as a
dynamic system of archetypal images. The vision of Durand, matured under the
influence of Jungs theories, but also under the theory of the residues and deri-
152
mythocritique,7 and thematic criticism,8 are methodological approaches

that are completely distinct from one another (and which have often
led to fervent polemical debate), they share a common position regarding
rewritings. These investigative approaches aim to retrieve a general nucleus in the text, a generative structure whether it is myth or a dynamic
system of archetypes, attitudes, or situations conceived as a whole and
composed of many segments or nuclei, through which it is possible to reconstruct a latent unity. According to this interpretative perspective, the
text represents a derivation,9 a modulation,10 a subordination to a higher
idea of myth. From this point of view, the relationship between the macrosystem of the myth and the particular rewriting is based on the dialectic
between permanence and transformation. This gives rise to comparative
studies which mainly aim to identify the elements of continuity and innovation in every rewriting with respect to the original model.
10
vations of Pareto, intends to show, to offer an almost mechanical model of the

myths functioning. Durand 1978, 29.
In his Dictionnaire des mythes littraires, Brunel affirms that it is impossible to approach the study of literary myths without having confronted the myth itself. To
support his claims, he takes Durands positions saying that: the myth is a whole,
that is, a unity that comprehends a plurality, a system of antagonistic forces
(Brunel 1992, 65), an oxymoron of destructive creation and creative destruction
(Brunel 1988, 66). Here we must find a pattern that boosts the myth: that is a
language pre-existing the text and above all a numinosit, a transcendence that
is opposed to the very immanence of the social. Cf. Brunel 1992, 58 59.
Trousson is more sceptical toward the archetypal Jungian matrix and in general
toward the structural analysis. He recognises the latter may be useful for the study
of the first literary crystallisation of myth, but it may not give account of the diachronic fortune of a theme. Nevertheless, he does claim that the theme of Antigone is from the beginning the expression of a political conflict (Trousson
1981, 115). In this manner he does postulate an incorruptible and constant nature, at least in its noyau, of the mythical figure which he calls theme. He further distinguishes two types of mythical themes: the character themes, which represent attitudes like Prometheus, for instance, represents the revolt and situation themes, which represent motives like Medea represents the motif of the
cheated on and abandoned woman (Trousson 1981, 23). Thus, the motive crystallizes itself , delimits itself , defines itself .
Durand claims that myths are dynamic systems with a constant minimum number of fundamental mythems that make up the hard core of every myth. Accordingly, the study of the derivations would focus on the evolution of this hard
core. He distinguishes between heretical, syncretic and ethical derivations. Cf.
Durand 1987.
Even if Brunel recognises through the particular text the right to vary the myth,
the variation is not completely free: it is only a modulation. Cf. Brunel 2000, 80.
153
The fact that this conception postulates the presence of a dynamic element, a polyvalence and flexibility represented by the particular text,
confirms nevertheless a totalising context in which diversity can be inscribed. In fact, what Derrida remarked about polysemy in the text could be
adapted here to the idea of myth:
[Polysemy] is organized within the implicit horizon of a unitary resumption
of meaning, that is the horizon of [] a teleological and totalizing dialectics
that at a given moment, however far off, must permit the reassemblage of the
totality of a text into the truth of its meaning [].11
In an analogous manner, these three mythocentric approaches insert the

polymorphic specificity of the text within a flux and therefore within a
continuity of the specific myth. According to these perspectives, myth appears endowed with a kind of substantiality that manifests itself naturally
through its very presence in the literary works. Following this assumption, the margins of creative liberty in a rewriting are circumscribed.
Even if the myth is not conceived as something outside of literature or
of history, it is still understood as being hors-texte and sur-text, two assumptions that inevitably undermine the autonomy of the work. However, the text is interpreted as something subhordinated to an idea (that of
myth) that defines it as variation. According to the deconstructionist approach, reading must not be content with doubling the text, it cannot
legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it, toward
a referent [] or toward a signified outside the text.12 On the contrary,
the mythocentric readings close the text under an overbearing hierarchy,
in which the rewritings are only able to modulate and vary upon something that is not only external to itself, but is also a superior presence that
is necessary.
A further limitation of the mythocentric approach is that its conception of myth assigns to it a universal truth-value, like an ontophany. The
pretence of identifying a scheme or situation as a natural constant being
preserved through the readings does not only mean as we have said
recognising an instance that is superior to the particularity of every
text, but also establishing an authentic and immutable version, which
is not subject to interpretation and may not be an object of deconstructive dismantling. Therefore, this noyau is endowed with a transcendent
life, which is manifested through the text as eternal present, and is up11 Derrida 2004d, 41.
12 Derrida 1997d, 158.
154
dated and characterised by the unity of its own existence (flexible, polymorphous, but still one).
Thus, if the history of metaphysics is the story of a determination of
being as presence, the literary myth becomes a metaphysical entity, endowed with an inalienable (and authoritarian) truth. The debunking gesture that dismantles every universal truth, which is sometimes seen as a
characteristic of deconstruction, induces us to distrust the concept of
myth, and consequently to demystify the universal character that is attributed to it. Jacques Boulogne, criticising this arbitrary unity of myth,
claims: What could be more misleading than the definite article the
myth of Orpheus? The article the is an abstraction
which multiple emerging versions participate in, as if they were updating a
preexisting virtual reality. Actually the essence does not precede existence, a
myth does not exist independently of its form, which is ever textual, even
when the event is iconographic.13
Identifying a fixed core within the myth inevitably leads to the temptation of assigning a semantic dimension to this immutable signifier, and
obviously, also recalling its ancestral character. Furio Jesi, who denounced
this risk in the course of his all too brief period of critical production,
wrote that
he who believes in the existence of the myth as an autonomous essence, also
tends to believe himself to be the custodian of exegetical sense, which, based
on the alleged foundation of the autonomous existence of the myth, distinguishes the Righteous from the Impious, those who must live from those
who must die.14
As a matter of fact, for those who recognise an essence in myth, the exegesis of the myth is a reflection they cannot avoid that is the case with
Trousson when he recognises in Antigone the expression of a political
conflict.15 Despite the generic character of the formulation, this interpretation imposes a forced and binding key for approaching the rewriting of
Antigone, and introduces a criterion of purity or suitability of the text
with respect to the model. We can enumerate endless examples of semantification of the archetypal scheme.16 The hermeneutic passage from find13
14
15
16
Boulogne 1994, 303 304.

Jesi 1973, 8.
Trousson 1981, 115.
Examining the case of Prometheus, Durand asserts: This myth defines always a
rationalist, humanist, progressive, scientistic, and sometimes socialist ideology.
Siganos, a scholar of the Mythocritique, defines the Urform of the labyrinth
155
ing some constant synchronicities (which are already the result of a subjective interpretation) to their interpretation is a praxis that is common to
all of these approaches. For his part, Durand criticises an epoch that has
reduced the meaning to the sole signifier and attributes to the myth the
hope of a parole retrouve, for the verticalit du signifi, for the reconciliation avec nos animalits.17
With these points in mind, we can turn to some of the difficulties
that the mythocentric approach encounters. Its search for constants is
not a simple search for the signifier: it is already a reading, an assertion
of a signified and a speech act that involves a subjective presence. Every
speech act is a performative act: the reading is always presented as a
sign greff of another sign. Therefore, the critical discourse that reduces
the openness of the sign to a dominant signifi following the logocentric
praxis of repeating the concept, the pense, the Ide 18 of the thing represented cannot claim to be neutral (or even natural), nor conceive the
object of the critical discourse as external to itself. The very conception
of the idea of myth and its relative significance is a performative
act, which cannot ever be claimed as a constant; it is rather an interpretation, just like a rewriting. And, just like any other kind of interpretation, it has a right to be as explicit and subjective as any reading of the
myth. The problem starts when the interpreter puts his interpretation
of the myth before his interpretation of the text, and thus forces the reader to avoid the specific hermeneutics of the myth expressed in every specific rewriting. In this way the text is subjected to an interpretative grid
composed of a system of constants whose only arbitrator is the interpreter
himself.19 In short, the text is not interpreted through the myth, but
founded on four aspects: The penetration into an astraying, conjectural space; a
space of an apparently digestive, uterine, if not even monstrous nature; a difficult
route towards a centre full of meaning, if not the Meaning. Siganos 1999, 43.
Siganos certainly does not hesitate to attribute to the labyrinth a semantic
value. The author wonders if the labyrinth is not, once again (or already
here), the expression of a desire to regressus ad uterum, back to the origin of
being, that means to the original Peace before any sexualization. Siganos
1999, 46.
17 Durand 2000, 30.
18 Derrida 1988a, 22.
19 In the introduction of his Mythe et criture, Siganos betrays the unequivocal interference of the subject of his approach: We need [] to welcome the texts,
meditate their sublime uncertainty, assessing the deep similarities of their horizons, evaluating finally, all the opportunities and constraints of an interpretation
that illuminates them mutually. Siganos 1999, 2.
156
through the interpretation that the myth-critic has previously projected

onto the myth, which he in turn imprints onto the text itself. If the interpretation of every rewriting which, as a part of its corpus, is supposed
to found the interpretation of the myth is based on the hermeneutic
perspective of the myth, it will inevitably be contaminated by the hermeneutics of the myth which have preceded it. Thus, if the myth results
from its versions, but its versions are interpreted through the verification
of the presence of constants, the result is a hermeneutic short-circuit. The
meaning of the text is subordinated to that of the myth,20 but as the
myth itself is a story, which in order to be identified as such must be interpreted (selecting the constitutive elements, removing those that are
spurious, referring to the corpus from which it originates), the interpretation of the text is bound to the subjective interpretation of the myth
that the critic finally offers.
In other words, all the mythocentric interpretations (mythanalyse,
mythocritique and thematic criticism) which are expressions of a subjective and cultural perspective present two problems: they pretend to defend a natural truth and they use the text surreptitiously and instrumentally, depriving it of its autonomy in order to make it a locus of verification for their truth. The meaning of myth, as it is assumed by the mythocentric perspective, resembles an act of faith that Derrida recognises in
the axiom that always affirms, as its name indicates, a value, a price; it
confirms or promises an evaluation that should remain intact and entail,
like every value, an act of faith.21
According to this scheme, to this resonnance universelle (Durand),
or transcendent numinosit (Brunel), a coherent continuity in the literary repertoire of rewritings however polymorphous and protean may
be recognised. Therefore, it is not surprising that the term tradition22 is
invoked. For Trousson, this term is charged with a determinist linearity,
and every single rewriting plays a determinate role in the sequence of
texts: It is known that the first character of a work based on a theme
is to come within the context, at its time, of a certain tradition, of a lin-
20 Bollack, referring to Euripides tragedies, says: If it is defined as demonstration

of myth, tragedy derives from myth its meaning or its message. Bollack 1997,
121.
21 Derrida 1998b, 58.
22 Trousson 1981, 75 84.
157
eage.23 This leads to a teleology where the text is reduced to a simple link
in a chain.
Once again a deconstructive gesture helps to rescue us from the metaphysical treatment of these mythocentric approaches. As Derrida denies
that communication can be the vehicle for proper sense aimed toward
the homogeneity presupposed by the communicative space,24 he explains
how this conception accepts the simplicity of the origin, the continuity
of all derivation, of all production, of all analysis and the homogeneity of
all dimensions [ordres].25 But, for Derrida, writing does not continually
stand in for a presence and could no longer (be) the (ontological) modification of presence.26 Rather it is a rupture, death, or the possibility of
the death of the recipient.27 Therefore, more often than not, rewriting is
not a part of a homogenous continuity. It is always a fracture: for it escapes the canon that such continuity would impose upon it, and claims
its own original authenticity.
2. The limits of deconstruction

In the preceding part of this argument we have criticised some common
attitudes of the mythocentric perspective. Using some deconstructive notions (like Derridas concepts of axiome, polysemia, or his denial of every
metaphysical gesture), we have argued that their attempt at finding a
forced interlocution between the text and the idea of myth inevitably
leads to a consideration of the text as a sort of modulation. The text is
supposed to hold an already crystallised meaning and, for this reason,
is inserted into a tradition which is assumed as being a universally shared
legacy which links the text to all the other rewritings of the same myth.
The myth, the theme, the abstract idea of a dynamic scheme of archetypes, cannot therefore represent a key for accessing the text without vio23 Trousson 1981, 75.
24 Derrida writes: The meaning, or contents of the semantic message would thus
be transmitted, communicated, by different means, by more powerful tecnhnical
mediations, over a far greater distance, but still within a medium that remains
fundamentally continous and its-self identical, a homogeneous element through
which the unity and wholeness of meaning would not be affected in its essence.
Derrida 1988a, 3.
25 Derrida 1988a, 4.
158
lently denying its autonomy and distorting its articulation according to

the parameters of this governing idea. This consideration leads us to reject the conception that rewritings emerge from a mechanism of repetition. Instead, this kind of text requires an interpretation that is focused
on textual autonomy.
Once the autonomy of the text is claimed against its mythocentric
readings, the interpreter is still required to tackle the peculiar double nature of a rewriting text. This second-hand work can be both a rewriting
of a specific text and a rewriting inspired by a specific general idea of
myth that is given by the synthesis and resemantification of an indistinct
corpus of other rewritings (literary texts, critiques, iconographic material). In both cases, this reference provides the text with a special connotation that cannot be overlooked. This model single or plural, precise or
general appears within the text in an original, new form always as a
resemanticisation. Derridas deconstruction formulates this textual relationship in terms of citation. According to this reading, the citationnalit
constitutes one of the central ideas of the theory of diffrance, where it is
postulated that any assertion may be considered a citation,28 as everything begins in the folds of citation.29 Not only rewriting texts, but
every text could be considered a chain of citations. As Derrida argues:
To write means to graft.30 No text is integrally original: its openness prevents it from fixing a beginning or an order. In Derridas essay Dissemination,31 he describes how the logic that inspires the distinction between
originaire and driv, which aims to identify the order between the first
and the second, is a numerical logic of expropriation necessarily implying
a first text, a commencement. But precisely because the rifts in it never
stand as origins: they always transform a preexisting text.32 In other
words, the chain of citations is too complex, too heterogenous and
non-linear, according to Derrida. Tracing backwards through this labyrinth presupposes a starting point, an origin, and therefore a kind of
sense; ultimately it presupposes enclosing the dissemination of the text.
Referring to deconstructive principles, this position is coherent with
the idea that the infinite opening of the text is freed as much from the
28 As is well known, in agreement with Austin, Derrida assumes that every performative act is also a citation to the extent that it should always be perceived as
conforming to a code, and therefore it is never originary, never first.
29 Derrida 2004a, 347.
30 Derrida 2004a, 389.
31 Derrida 2004a, 317.
32 Derrida 2004a, 367.
159
yoke of the context as from literal or ideologically reconstructable references. Therefore, deconstruction rejects a claim of legitimacy for the interpretation, since an interpretation that is supposed to be more correct
than another necessarily imposes a semantic restriction. In relation to literary influences, the fact that the text is sans fin et sans commencement,
delegitimises any attempt to search for the textual sources, which Derrida
calls an archaeo-teleo-logical search.
Yet, it is clear from one perspective that Derridas radicalism contains
an aporetic turn which cannot be resolved without difficulty. Refusing the
archaeological effort, that is to say, denying the contribution of every
other hypotext of the text in question, leads to extreme consequences
in the interpretation of a rewriting. In the first place, to ignore the literary
roots of the text could imply converting a mythical reference into an
anonymous one. Without its age-old chain of precedents, a modern Oedipus loses its resonance by being deprived of its specific dialogue with
the past. In the second place, to give up the archaeological approach,
which means abandoning the search for the specific intertextual chain
of each rewriting, allows the possibility of manipulating the reading
through the idea of myth which is open to the interpretation of the critic.
If the reference is not interpreted through its preceding textual trails, this
deconstructing gesture, paradoxically, ends up offering an argument for
the mythocentric readings.
Only by taking the specific hypotext of a rewriting into account, and
not as deconstruction proposes abandoning the search for the original
sources, can the textual autonomy of the rewriting be preserved from
metaphysical agency. Even if they are not an original in a teleological
sense, hypotexts must be considered as reworked materials that compose
the text as in a bricolage work. In other words, Anouilhs Antigone is constructed by deconstructing the one by Sophocles; Gides Oedipus breaks
up and unscrambles the ancient homonymous tragedy; Christa Wolf s
Medea is inspired by the discovery of some sources more ancient than
Euripides, and so on.
The way in which a rewriting is inspired by another rewriting has
been the subject of Genettes taxonomy, but it also gives rise to the
well known theories of the phenomena of anxiety, repression and appropriation of influences, generated by literary love, tempered by defense,33
which are proposed by Harold Bloom. In any case, as Bloom emphasises
using Tolstoys words, for criticism we need people who [] would con33 Bloom 2011, 8
160
tinually guide readers in that endless labyrinth of linkages that makes up

the stuff of art, and bring them to the laws that serve as the foundation
for those linkages.34 From this point of view, any interpretation that neglects the reference before the text will fail to understand the new meaning
claimed by the rewriting itself. Rewritings explicitly refer to the comparison to (and the overcoming of ) a model, flaunting a mechanism of resemantisation which is often articulated and coherent from the ideological point of view.35
To examine rewritings, then, in the most conclusively balanced context given the range of conflicting interpretations, the interpreter is required to recognise the varying kinds of comparisons around the text.
To review these comparisons, we have made an enquiry into two kinds
of approach the text itself (deconstruction) or the network of other associated texts, including its originary (mythocentric). While the project is
more fully realised by rejecting the abuses brought about by misreadings
of the hors-texte as well as those of deconstruction, only by rearticulating
the specific horizon for every single text can this be accomplished. An
analysis rooted in the textual material,36 that tracks both the intertextual
influences and also the very conception of the myth expressed in the text,
is the only approach whereby an interpretation (however fragmentary, incomplete or partial) can be achieved.
Translated by Shelley Campbell and Marika Josephson
34 Bloom 2011, 9
35 Barthes has illustrated in the most convincing manner how the myth is offered as
a transfiguration of culture into nature. A similar claim about the universal is
often found in the rewritings of myths.
36 The reference is of course to the material hermeneutic proposed by Peter Szondi
and Jean Bollack, which would be worthy of a specific discussion.
Translation: Theory and Praxis.

Deconstruction and Reconstruction
in Giacomo Leopardi
Maria Spiridopoulou
1. Deconstruction and reconstruction in theory
Jacques Derrida acknowledged the impossibility of defining deconstruction, attesting that it is neither a method, nor a discipline, it is not
even knowledge or science,1 but simply plus dune langue, more than a
language.2 This pseudo-definition signals, in a preliminary manner, his
thought not only on language, but also on the nature of translation3 as
theory and praxis together, denoting that it is linked to his ideas about
deconstruction. Indeed, Derrida does not aim at a different method of
analysis concerning the act of translating, but instead expands the conceptual structure that has always been the main concern of his theoretical
thought and research, by shifting the centre of gravity from unitary to
multiple, from a fixed meaning to an unstable and lacunary meaning, fo1
2
3
Deconstruction is not simply a philosophy, nor is it a group of theses, not even

the question of Being, in the Heideggerian sense. In a certain manner, it is nothing. It cannot be a discipline or a method. Often, it is presented as a method, or
it is transformed into a method, with a set of rules, procedures that can be taught,
etc. It is not a technique, with norms and procedures. [] In its very principle,
deconstruction is not a method. [] Deconstruction is not a methodology, that
is, not an application of rules. (La dconstruction nest pas simplement une philosophie, ni un ensemble de th ses, ni mme la question de lEtre, au sens heideggrien. Dune certaine mani re, elle nest rien. Elle ne peut pas tre une discipline ou une mthode. Souvent, on la prsente comme une mthode, ou on la
transforme en une mthode, avec un ensemble de r gles, de procdures quon
peut enseigner, etc. Ce nest pas une technique, avec des normes ou des procdures. [] Mais, en son principe mme, la dconstruction nest pas une mthode. [] Mais la dconstruction nest pas une mthodologie, cest--dire lapplication de r gles.) Cf. Derrida 2004c.
Cf. Derrida 1988b, 38 f.
See on this subject, Derrida 2001a, 174 200.
162
Maria Spiridopoulou
calising on difference, interaction and integration, and no longer on identity and presence. He assigns a primary and central place to translation,
which is no longer a copy of any text, no longer left in the background
and relegated to a secondary role of serving the original.
All translation theories from Roman times to the 20th century, from
Cicero to the recently-founded science of translatology with all its current
trends, are based on antinomies, for example, letter/spirit, word/meaning,
verbo/senso, faithful/free. The most recent are based on the vague concept
of equivalence between the original and its translation, pointing out the
impossibility of an ideal version which would faithfully transpose the true
meaning of the message from one language to another. However, would
this true meaning not imply a link to a set meaning of the words inhabiting an aseptic and fixed lexicographic environment? Hence, the acceptance that any transposition inevitably alters the original significance of
words, and that all acts of translating are destined to failure. But what
does failure in translating mean? If aiming for an exact transposition either in form or content of any signified, or if seeking perfect fidelity and
reproduction of content, then failure is inevitable. Derrida makes precisely this point: We will never and, in reality, we have never dealt with the
transport of any pure signified into another language, or even into the
same one.4 Even Andr Breton attacked the verbal theology and the metaphysics of language, wishing to free words from their bondage; those
words were asking to no longer be treated as the little auxiliaries they
had always been taken for,5 since, according to Breton, modes of expression are established and founded on the rules of logic which oblige us to
designate objects using their precise name accepted by common sense and
defined in the dictionary.
The impossibility of a single transparent and adequate translation is
already discernible, in an emblematic way, in the very use of the word
translation. First of all, it appears more complex at the descriptive
level in reference to the phenomenon identified by the theoreticians. Sec4
5
Derrida 1972, 31 f.
Breton 1969, 131. The converging point in Breton and Derrida thought is to be
found in Derridas claim that translation does not seek to say this or that, to
transfer such or such content, to communicate a certain load of meaning, but
to point out the affinity between languages, to exhibit its own possibility. (La
traduction ne chercherait pas dire ceci ou cela, transporter tel ou tel contenu,
communiquer telle charge de sens mais remarquer laffinit entre les langues,
exhiber sa propre possibilit.) Derrida 1987b, 220.
Translation: Theory and Praxis
163
ond, at the verbal level, it is a term whose restricted sense is still relevant
today.
In terms of definition, a taxonomic effort has already been made by
Roman Jakobson, who has sought to divide and describe, in a summary
and imperious manner, the act of translating by designating his three well
known categories:6 the interlinguistic or translation as such, that is, the
transposition of words from one language to another; the interlingual
translation or reformulation which is concerned with the interpretation
of linguistic signs by means of other signs of the same language; and,
the intersemiotic translation or transmutation, that is the interpretation
of linguistic signs by means of non-linguistic signs. However, language
is not a homogeneous, closed, fixed (static) and immutable system, and
the passage of words from one language to another is neither linear
nor devoid of obstacles. What happens, for instance, with certain poetic
Greek texts of the 20th century which present synchronically the entire
Greek language in its diachronicity: from ancient Greek, through Byzantine, to Modern Greek, and whose reformulation is necessary before approaching translation as such? How to translate a text that incorporates
reactivated and semantically redefined linguistic signs which are nothing
but echoes of the past, a sort of palimpsest of the Greek language?
Should, in this case, translating, paraphrasing, and re-wording not coexist? Is this not an instance of the existence of many languages in a single
linguistic system?
To further highlight the absence of frontiers between languages and
linguistic systems and, as a result, point out the elliptical and restrictive
aspects of the categorisation proposed by Jakobson, we would like to examine the special case of Assia Djebars language, which we addressed
when translating her novel A Sister to Scheherazade 7 from French into
Greek. Assia Djebar uses a language which admirably unites oral and erudite elements with poetic expressions and colloquial turns of phrase. We
also find in her language the incorporation of Arabic words and popular
expressions filtered through her seemingly uniform and fluid French. A
language represents relics, echoes of other languages and speech patterns,
but it also constitutes a centre of multiple energies connoting a correspondent challenge for the translator. Thus within the same linguistic system we uncover many tongues and languages.
6
7
Jakobson 1963, 79 f.
Djebar 2006.
164
Maria Spiridopoulou
And what could be said of texts including quotations in different languages (such as the case of Italo Calvino in American lessons), or of those
that blur the identity of language by inserting words of other languages,
signs which interact with those that surround them, abolishing ipso facto
the dictionary meaning of words through their transformative effect?8
Should one translate them or leave them as they stand? And if they retain
their original characters, is the altering effect not increased? The issue is
further complicated, for instance, in the Greek case through having a different alphabet. What should then be the choice of the translator?
Through our examples we demonstrate that the three categories coined
by Jakobson do not correspond to the multiform linguistic reality of
texts and to the various practices of translating; consequently, the entire
conceptualisation of translation is being questioned and comes to seem
problematic.
According to Derrida, this is indeed one of the limits on theories of
translation, to the extent that they do not take into account the possibility
for more than two languages to be involved in a text.9 Hence the following questions: How to render the plurality effect? And if we translate in
many languages at the same time, should we call that translating?10
However, if we briefly survey the twists and turns of the terms used to
define the act of translating from Roman antiquity to the 14th century,
when the word translation first appears in the Romance languages, we
see that through a series of lexical transformations, there is a loss in meaning, a restriction in its semantic field, and an impoverishment of the term
itself. The Greek word hermeneia 11 conveyed expression, explanation,
performance of a theatrical play, an act of communication by means of
the voice and, consequently, active participation. The Latin words translatio and interpretatio replaced this Greek term.12
These terms have remained in effect since the Renaissance. However
Eugene Valence asserts that the word interpretatio has lost the notion of
productive activity, which existed in the Greek term, and still exists in
the modern Greek, also signifying recitals and interpretations of musical
8 The following passage is given as an example: Thus I still prefer the version
quoted by Barbey dAurevilly, in spite of its patched up roughness. (Perci continuo a preferire la versione riportata da Barbey dAurevilly, nonostante la sua
rozzezza un po patched up.) Calvino 1988, 36.
9 Derrida 1987b, 207 208.
10 Derrida 1987b, 207 208.
11 Liddell/Scott 1996, 690.
12 On this subject, see Bruni 2002, 73 97.
165
works.13 On the contrary, translatio encompasses a vast semantic horizon;

it derives from the past participle of the verb transferre, which means to
move from one place to another, to transfer, to drive, to transport but
also to postpone, to differ, to apply, to translate, to transform, to change.
And indeed, transferre also means to differ, being very close to the
Greek dia-ferein, having in common ferein-ferre (to carry) but also
the same prefix trans-dia. The Latin verb traducere was introduced at
the beginning of 15th century by Leonardo Bruni, and replaced many
terms used until then (convertere, imitari, reddere, transferre), signifying to transport or to guide. Nevertheless, we observe that it has lost
the notion of interaction and productive activity that the Greek term ermineia possesses, and similarly the notion of transformation/change of
the Latin terms transferre/translatio. Thus it has only kept the seme of
to transport and maybe its modern derivatives translation/traduzione
of the Romance languages, highlighting in effect the impoverishment
of the unilateral and unidirectional dimension of the passage/transfer
from one language to another. We observe that the same limiting conception of translation emerges in terms relative to texts and languages: we
speak of source-language and target-language as if they have to do
with the mobility of merchandise. We talk about source-language text
and target-language text as if there is a kind of transcendental insight
emerging from a primordial elsewhere to be attained or pursued.
However, we have seen that the term translation does not encompass
all the dimensions or multiplicity of the phenomenon. The word metafrasi 14 in ancient and medieval Greek signified formulation of a text in a
different phrasal manner or in a different style, for example, a paraphrase;
and it is currently attached to Jakobsons intralinguistic system. But the
distinction between intralinguistic and interliguistic practices is not
apparent in a language like Greek which stretches further in time and
space, surviving within modern Greek without having suffered the
same breaks as those of the Latin and Romance languages. The distinction of the limits between these categories of translation practices, as
well as between translation as such and paraphrase, is never clear. The
term metafrasi is currently used in modern Greek for any translation
covering all acts of translating. This word, closely linked to the synthetic
conception of the ancient Greek language, extends over the limits of the
13 Derrida 1985, 136 137.
166
Maria Spiridopoulou
terms examined and their translating dimension; it could be nearer to the

complex and polyphonic phenomenon of the activity of translating.
With a single linguistic element, the prefix-conjunction meta,15 two
conceptual elements emerge, two meanings closely linked to their different constructions: the meaning of between, of amidst and of with, together with the genitive which promotes the meaning of participation
(sin + praxis), in common, along with; as well as lato sensu with the accusative promoting the meaning of between two or between many.
This has to do with the Greek ana-meson, anamesa. It is this economy
of in-betweenness Derrida speaks about as the relation between the text
to be translated and the translated text. Furthermore, the construction
with the accusative plural links the meaning of among as well as that
of succession, of continuity, of various elements the designation and
the range of which do not differ: among them and with them. This designates therefore an in-between that separates while uniting, and at the
same time a relation and a distance, marking an interaction and a cooperation. In order to reconstruct and rehabilitate the lost meanings of the
term, we would like to propose the Greek term meta-frasi which, according to its etymology, is a sin-praxis, a communion, a participation
of various phrases/languages/texts, a mental and practical act involving
plurality and parity.
This concept aims at treating the text to be translated and its translations in terms of equality, without granting primacy to the original, synonymous with the authentic and the first, whose successive appearances
in other languages are inevitably attached to the idea of reproduction,
copy or fake. Walter Benjamin asserts that translation is a form (bersetzung ist eine Form).16 In this sense maybe the word prototype, which in
Greek means first form, the principle of the form (see archetype), renders the idea of plurality of forms which follows in successive translations
without granting primacy or supremacy to the original, or assigning a secondary place to the translated texts.
By definition, the traditional translation theories, through the terminology adopted, as well as in their conception, are predicated on the singularity of the original and its inaugural meaning, on the power exercised
and preserved by the proto-text on and within the meta-text, and, consequently, on the clear and imperative distinction between translated text
15 Liddell/Scott 1996, 1108 f.
16 Benjamin 1972, 9.
167
and text in translation. Supporters of the target language17 (i. e. Ladmiral)

and of the source language18 (i. e. Berman) alike have interposed an unfathomable distance and have considered the text in translation as derivative and as always following from a model. As such it is this inimitable
and irreproachable unicum, which we could render and recreate inaccurately, depending on the freedom we allow or the respect we impose upon
ourselves within either the source or the target language. Thus, any process of translating would only reproduce a mirror reflection, an imperfect
double, defective in comparison to the original. Yet what about the text
without its translation? Would it qualify as an original? What would then
be its ontological dimension? And, what if translation does not depend
on the original but the original upon its translation? What if intrinsically
texts need and demand translating to continue to live, and the translations then guarantee their survival?
These are fundamental questions about the classical conception of
translation that resulted from the scandalous impact that Derrida exerted
in literary circles. They have affected the translation scene, our way of
thinking, and even the act of translating itself. The translator speaks at
least two languages and, according to Derrida, is never enclosed in the
column of one single tongue.19 That explains why in translating the
translator makes unities and pairs interact with each other; he creates
this precious space of cohabitation, and aesthetic and linguistic regeneration, of continuous rebirth of the translated text via the text of its translation. His translation act is an act of faith and love towards the text, although he knows that each word is a locus of multiple translations and
realises the absence of all static and immutable sense. He treats the text
to be translated as a dearly departed who asks to emerge out of forgetfulness. The translator with whom he enters into discussion thus reinforces
his presence-absence by integrating him into his own life. The text of the
translation comes into the world and the translated text is reborn under a
17 The theories favouring the target-language do not accept irregularities in the
translated language and are linked to a kind of ethnocentrism, since they tend
to refuse anything foreign in the text of the translation. This text has to be
read as if it were originally written in the target-language. On this subject, see
Ladmiral 1986, 33 42.
18 The theories favouring the source-language tend to keep the structure of the original language, since it is the foreign element that has to be felt in the translation.
The translated work has to bear the traces of its origins and its belonging to another culture. See Berman 1984.
19 Derrida 1986, cited in Tavor Bannet 1993, 591.
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Maria Spiridopoulou
different form of life, transformed and saved from the immobility to

which it was relegated by tradition and the temporal dimension.
The relationship between signifier and signified varies according to
shifts of intralinguistic context as well to shifts in the relationship between different languages. According to Derrida, the difference between
signifier and signified is never pure, absolute and clear, thus indicating
that language is always in movement and in exile. He describes language
as endless chains of signification interacting and feeding each other reciprocally. The philosopher claims that there are two possibilities: immobilising the meaning of a word or exceeding its polysemy, that is to say, on
the one hand, the possible existence of an immutable significance despite
its semantic transformations, and on the other, the strict designation of
context. These remain problematic in a language whether it is a dead
or a living one. Thus, completeness does not exist in languages and
each word, polysemic by definition, becomes a locus of multiple possibilities of translation; that is why translation in itself has less to do with
what is to be translated and the meaning of the text itself, and more
with who each translator is: each translator reads in it, sees in it, hears
in/between/through the words, and that which he does not manage to
conceive, distinguish, catch. And
we can grant that every letter and every term admits of a Babel of different,
and often incommensurable, translations, and that these different translations are therefore joined in the letter on in the term, without concluding
that the only possible contemporary response to multiplicity must be confusion.20
Indeed, we could bring the confusio linguarum closer to the divisio linguarum, which is felt by the translator as a condition sine qua non of his
proper existence, even though he lives it in a painful manner through
the practice of his profession. If, according to Jakobson, the meaning
of a word is nothing but its translation by another sign which can be substituted for it,21 and if all readings are translations, this implies that, even
more so, the act of translating is a double translation. Through its reading-comprehension the translator mentally decodes, deconstructs, dismantles and translates by paraphrasing and reconstructing the meaning
of the text. This mental translation, a kind of abstract writing, takes
place a thousand times in the translators mind and precedes the actual
20 Tavor Bannet 1993, 592.
21 Jakobson 1963, 79.
169
writing and the translation itself which is accompanied by doubts, lacunae, indecisions.
2. Deconstruction and reconstruction in practice:

Giacomo Leopardis Infinite
In order to approach the phenomenon of dissemination of the meaning
of the original in its translations and Derridas undecided words, meaning two contradictory things at the same time and presenting itself as the
necessary condition for the re-semantisation of the metaphrastic space, we
are now going to examine Leopardis Infinite. 22 Although there are many
translations in French, we are going to examine Sainte-Beuves23 historic
translation of 1844, and the more recent one given by Ren Char and
Franca Roux24 in 1966. Oddly enough, I Canti have not yet been translated into modern Greek in one volume and have not been edited in their
entirety; thus we do not have at our disposal many examples of Greek
translations. We will therefore take into account Marino Siguros25 translation of 1955, authored by a native of Zakinthos of Italian descent on
his mothers side, and the translation made by Nasos Vaghenas26 in 1990.
The poem is a kind of emblematic locus of fundamental issues such as
finitude and its harsh decrees relating to the human condition, the dichotomy between eternal and ephemeral, life and death, or even the spirits exile from matter. Consequently, it presents a number of difficulties
about apprehending its meaning and its lexical items, and reconstructing
it, transformed into another language.
We are going to focus on four fundamental words, which form the
basis of the poems approach to the issues it addresses: ermo, mirando,
mi fingo, and mi sovvien. Firstly, ermo colle refers not only to a site
but, as specialists27 have already explained, to a situation, a necessary element for the search from the visible to the invisible, from the tangible
to the intangible, an implacable search of the poetic I which will end
in ruin. Ermo means at the same time a deserted, uninhabited and aban22
23
24
25
26
27
Leopardi
Leopardi
Leopardi
Leopardi
1981,
1988,
1988,
1988,
119 f.
21.
36.
18.
Me|teqg Euqypazj^ Kocotewm_a (Modern European Literature) 1998, 94.

On this subject, see Amoretti 1978, 81; Valentini 1989, 440.
170
Maria Spiridopoulou
doned place, as well as lonely and solitary, deriving from the Greek erimos.28 And, by their separation, these two meanings offer two solutions:
the one given by Sainte-Beuve, dserte, and the other by Char, seule.
However, with this double locative and existential meaning, could
ermo not be linked to the solitude of the hill as well as to the solitary
and exiled soul of the poetic I? Could this same soul, impoverished
and deserted in its isolation, not be reflected in the poem, in a desire
to identify itself to this height? Is there not an agreement, a psychological
harmonisation between these two states that become lexicalised with the
adjective caro (dear), present in the first verse? Maybe we should unite
the two meanings. The word ermo in Greek gives us this possibility since
it means alone, solitary, deserted, but also unhappy and poor, terms
which characterise any solitary suffering. On the contrary, erimos means
only desert, empty and has no affective content.
Furthermore, the poetic I sits passively in a state of immobility; its
vision cannot surmount this hedge that hides much of its horizon, and
the verb mirare in the translations of Siguro and Char is rendered by
the verb to look, which is a contradiction, a paradox from the point
of view of common sense. Sainte-Beuve by-passes the problem by paraphrasing the thought which has surmounted the hedge. Thus, he
makes the meaning explicit by means of a sort-of version that does not
respect the economy of language, the rule of oikos, quantitative and
qualitative of all relevant translations, according to Derrida.29
If we explore the etymology of the word mirare, we find it comes
from the Latin miror and that it does not mean simply to look but induces a state of wonder,30 an internal condition in the sense of looking
with admiration, being stupefied, wondering in amazement or even failing to understand. Mirando is then a gerund that poses serious problems
to the translator and especially if we take into consideration the verb mi
fingo. Sainte-Beuve transforms it in the following phrase: me sont
29 Concerning the principle of economy, he argues that it signifies two things, property and quantity: on the one hand, what concerns the law of property (oikonomia,
the law nomos of the oikos), of what is proper, appropriate to itself, at home
and translation is always an attempt at appropriation that aims to transport
home, in its language, in the most appropriate way possible, in the most relevant
way possible, the most proper meaning of the original text [] and, on the other
hand, a law of quantity when one speaks of economy, one always speaks of calculable quantity. Derrida 2001, 178 f.
30 Markantonatos 2006, 223; DArbella 1954, 688.
171
comme un abme (they are to me like an abyss), and transporting the

thought onto the other side of the hedge, he introduces arbitrarily the
word abyss. On the contrary, Char uses the word to create (crer)
and keeps the thought in its place in order to underline the impossibility
of feeling anything without it, of having the experience of the endless expanses and the superhuman silences.
Indeed, this can only happen in thought with the help of the imagination. Even more so, since the verb in question existed in Latin31 and
meant to imagine, to represent. We also find it in Cruscas Dictionary
of the 19th century, where it is defined in terms of creating through the
imagination. Siguro thus opts for a translation involving the idea of representation (parastainei), whilst Vaghenas tries to join the two meanings
of mirare and fingere with the verb oramatizomai which, however,
means to see visions and to aim. We could probably fill the lacuna
and its semantic deviations by introducing in place of mirare the verb
hyq~/heyq~ in modern Greek, meaning to sense,32 to consider, and
containing the verb oq\y-y in the sense of looking inwardly.33 And,
in place of mi fingo we could use the verb pk\hy. Indeed, the verb
pk\hy, pk\ssy (and in ancient Greek pk\tty) means, according to
Liddell & Scott, to mould, to fabricate, to form an image in the
mind,34 and in modern Greek it retains all these correspondences, adding
to the meaning to imagine, to meditate, to reflect upon.
However, confronted with the infinite, endless space, with the inaccessible and the unknown opening like an abyss, the heart fears, and
looks to overcome its fear and a kind of cosmic terror. The poetic I
brings together the silence of the sky, the atemporal dimension, the absolute peace, to the voice of the wind, to what we can hear, to what is close,
to what is sensed.
But at the same time the rustling wind awakens the feeling of uneasiness, of this being which exists in the ephemeral world, imperfect, finite;
it frightens him, and our mind then goes to the dolce e chiara la notte e
senza vento. The rustling wind seems hostile and the comparison with
endless silence that had scared him previously reinforces its conflicting
31 DArbella 1954, 422.
32 The verb heyq]y/heyq~ in ancient Greek means to look towards something, to
observe, but also to ponder, to study. See Stamatakos 1972, 450.
33 As a transitive verb, it means to observe, to comprehend something, but it has
also a metaphorical use connected with vision of the mind, and means to discern, to observe, to comprehend. See Stamatakos 1972, 700.
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Maria Spiridopoulou
presence. The contemplation of these endless spaces could be an attempt

to escape from the visible and natural world, a kind of reverie which gives
the possibility of escape and of finding refuge in peacefulness, in the unperturbed cosmic nothingness. We thus do not know if what follows, mi
sovvien leterno, associated with the temporal dimension of the past and
the present, to the dead seasons and to the one present, creates relief or
increases the sentiment of anguish. And, if we think about the correspondence between past and silence, and between the voice of the
wind and the season rustling and full of life, we cannot give an exact
meaning to the verb in question and decide about its translation. This
is even more relevant if we think about the interpretations of specialists
like Thilger, who claims that the poet leaves the level of intellectual comparison and glides towards a new reverie with his eyes open, towards a
dream that is a memory.35 Or, like Fubini who notes: sovvenire is
used for the past, but in the poems atmosphere of dream, even the present emerges like a memory.36
Still others are in favour of the meaning in mentem venire and
maintain that mi sovviene does not mean I remember but rather it
comes to my mind, based on the fact that the expression is related to
the present time and as such we cannot remember it.37 Sainte-Beuve
translates the verse in question with le grand ge mapparat (the great
age appears to me), quite close to the epiphany of the unknown, and
Char me souviens de lternel (I remember the eternal). Vaghenas
using the verb aish\molai (feeling) approaches the unknown through
ones senses as if it were something tangible, neighbouring, familiar, involving no mental effort. For his part, Siguro uses the verb to ponder,
although in a popular form, intellectualising any effort to give form, to
embrace the infinite through the creative force of the imagination. Increasing even further the ambiguity and the obscurity of this verse, one
should also remark on the etymology of the verb: it comes from the
Latin sub-venio which, according to Leopardi,38 is equivalent to sopravvenire/sovvenire, (vengo da sotto in su); maybe then to resurface, to
emerge in the mind or in the memory. Furthermore, sovvenire
comes from subvenire which means to help, to rescue, to provide
for, but also from succurrere, that is, to come to mind.
35
36
37
38
Tilgher 1979, 186, cited in Valentini 1989, 446.

Leopardi 1966a, 117.
Blasucci 1985, 104 f.
Leopardi 2007, 594.
173
We therefore find ourselves at an impasse that Derrida calls un-decidable. The thought that a single verb is so mysterious through presenting two correspondences which multiply the possibilities of translation by
disseminating its meaning prompts the translator to stop translating and
to stay immobilised in front of this metaphrastic aporia. Some English
translators have used the verbs to recall,39 to ponder,40 to occur,41
which are close to the meaning of coming to mind and arriving, but
have not considered the meaning of memory.
However, man is enclosed in the finite, the definite and the limitations of the earth, of the hedge, of the ultimate horizon, and seeks
other realities which could elevate him above tangible reality to redeem
himself from his incompleteness. The emergence of other realities occurs
through the contemplation of the infinite, made possible by the means of
the power of poetic speech. After the initial terror of confronting immense spaces and superhuman silences, man confronts this same endless
silence in the voice of the wind and seems to be appeased by a move of
reconciliation with the unknown. Then, in some sort of amplification,
this voice becomes the sound of reason, which is present and embraces
the dead seasons, but is also eternal. It is a call to the infinite, an attempt
to grasp it, but also to get help through its invocation as if it were an ancient god. And it seems to us that mi sovvien should mean come to
mind in accordance with an upwards and backwards movement in the
hope of managing to touch, even if just ever so slightly, the idea of the
infinite. This complex idea might possibly be expressed with the Greek
verb ama-tq]wy which means to run back, to revert,42 and combines
the backwards and upwards motif by means of the preposition ama,
meaning upwards.
The human desire to rise above reality as if it were a hill, a tower uniting the low with the high, results in wreckage but it is a sweet wreckage. It
is maybe the desire of the text itself to be translated by calling to its translator (who has the capability) to surpass linguistic frontiers and seek the
profound union of languages, even though he knows that there will always be shadowy, grey zones, unsolvable questions.
Being neither a science nor a secondary activity, translation is a creative act, a techne; according to Wittgenstein the translation of a lyrical
39
40
41
42
Leopardi 1887; Leopardi 1900; Leopardi 1987.

Leopardi 1966b.
Leopardi 1903.
Liddell/Scott 1996, 124.
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Maria Spiridopoulou
poem resembles a mathematical problem: we can solve it but there does

not exist a single systematic method to get to its solution.43 The translator has to deconstruct into relevant parts the work of the foreign writer;
and after that he has to build a new work in order to reconstruct it in the
new language. But isnt this the work of an artist in general? Isnt he deconstructing life itself and at the same time reconstructing it in a new
form and thereby creating a new meaning?
Poems in reference
Linfini
Jaimai toujours ce point de colline dserte,
Avec sa haie au bord, qui cl t la vue ouverte
Et mempche datteindre lextrme horizon.
Je massieds: ma pense a franchi le buisson;
Lespace dau-del men devient plus immense,
Et le calme profond et linfini silence
Me sont comme un abme; et mon cur bien souvent
En frissonne tout bas. Puis, comme aussi le vent
Fait bruit dans le feuillage, mon gr, je ram ne
Ce lointain de silence cette voix prochaine:
Le grand ge ternel mapparat, avec lui
Tant de mortes saisons, et celle daujourdhui,
Vague cho. Ma pense ainsi plonge la nage,
Et sur ces mers sans fin jaime jusquau naufrage.
Translated by C. A. Sainte-Beuve, 1844 44
Linfini
Toujours ch re me fut cette colline si seule
et cette haie qui, par tant de longuers,
drobe au regard le dernier horizon.
Mais quand je massieds pour la regarder,
Par ma pense se crent au-del delle
Dinterminables espaces, des silences surhumaines,
Une paix tr s profonde; o
peu sen faut
Que mon cur ne seffraie. Et lorsque
43 Wittgenstein 1967, 121, cited by Steiner 2004, 464 (my translation).
44 Leopardi 1988, 21.
Jentends le vent bruire dans les plantes,

Je vais comparant linfini de ce silence
A cette voix, et je me souviens de lternel,
Des saisons mortes, et de celle prsente
Et vivante, et de son bruissement. Ainsi
Dans cette immensit sanantit ma pense:
Et naufrager mest doux en cette mer.
Translated by Ren Char and Franca Roux, 1966 45
To \peiqo
Ac\pgsa p\mta tom ]qlo k|vo
Pou dem av_mei tg lati\ lou p]qa
Eje_ ma vt\sei yr touqamo} tgm \jqg.
St]jy, tap]qamta jutt\f l\jqg
Ji ap|joslg siyp^, bahi\ cak^mg
Jquv\ lou paqasta_mei o kocisl|r lou
Ji o tq|lor tgm jaqdi\ lou p\ei ma p\qei.
Ji |pyr ajo}y l]sa sta demtqojk\dia
To ac]qi ma stem\fei, ec~ sucjq_my
Tgm \peiqg sic^ le tg vym^ tou,
Jai sukkocio}lai tgm aimi|tg
Jai tour jaiqo}r pou ep]hamam jai to}tom
Tom tyqim| jaiq| pou fei jai pm]ei
Ji ]tsi ckuj\ mi~hy to stowasl| lou
Ma pm_cetai sto p]kaco tou Ape_qou.
Translated by Marino Siguro, 1955 46
To \peiqo
Acapgl]mor lo} ^tam p\mta aut|r o k|vor
o ]qglor, ji aut\ ta d]mtqa pou lou jq}boum
tom lajqim|m oq_fomta. La ed~ pou st]jy
oqalat_folai tir awame_r ejt\seir
t ouqamo} jai tgm upeqj|slia cak^mg
ji amatqiwi\fy. Jai jah~r ajo}y
l]sa ap to v}kkyla to hq|isla tou a]qa
sucjq_my tgm al|kumtg siyp^ tou ape_qou
l aut|m tom ^wo. Ji aish\molai to ai~mio,
45 Leopardi 1988, 36.

46 Leopardi 1988, 18.
175
176
Maria Spiridopoulou
jai tir sbgsl]mer epow]r, jai tg dij^ lar

pou fei jai p\kketai. Ji o stowasl|r lou
pm_cetai stg bahi\ apeqamtos}mg.
S aut^ tg h\kassa ckuj| e_mai to mau\cio.
Translated by Nasos Vaghens, 1990 47
To \peiqo
Acapgl]mor lou ^tam p\mta o ]qlor aut|r k|vor,
ji aut^ g pqasi\ pou ap| pamto}
to bk]lla lou apojke_ei ap| tom ]swato oq_fomta.
J\holai |lyr jai hyq~ to ap]qamto to di\stgla
Pou apk~metai lajqi\ tgr, ji o mour lou pk\hei
Tgm upeqj|slia sic^, tg bah}tatg gqel_a pou
Swed|m v|bor tgm jaqdi\ lou tgm acc_fei. Ji |tam tom \melo
Ajo}y ma hqo_fei l]sa se to}ta ta vut\,
tgm \peiqg sic^ le to}tg tg vym^ amaletq\y :
jai amatq]wy stgm aiymi|tgta,
jai stir peqasl]mer epow]r jai stgm paqo}sa,
fymtam^ laf_ le tgm gw~ tgr. O mour lou
pm_cetai s aut^m tgm apeqamtos}mg.
Se to}tg ed~ tg h\kassa ckuj| e_mai to mau\cio.
Translated by Maria Spiridopoulou 48
Vocabulary
1. mirando < mirare < from the Latin miror = a state of marvelling, an
internal situation in the sense of looking with admiration, being stupefied, wondering in amazement or even failing to understand.
Siguro and Char: looking;
Sainte-Beuve: the thought which has surmounted the hedge;
Mirare = hyq~, heyq~ (+ oq\y-y): to consider, to look from a distance
and with admiration, to look inwardly.
2. mi fingo < from the Latin fingere = to imagine, to represent.
Fingere in the 19th century: to create by means of the imagination (to
simulate).
47 Me|teqg Euqypazj^ Kocotewm_a (Modern European Literature) 1998, 94.
48 Our proposed translation for the purpose of this paper.
177
Siguro: to represent (paqasta_mei);

Vaghenas: mirare + mi fingo = oqalat_folai (to see visions, to aim);
Sainte-Beuve: [the thought which has surmounted the hedge] / are to me
like an abyss;
Char: to create;
Mi fingo = pk\hy, pk\ssy (in ancient Greek, pk\tty): to mould, to fabricate, from an image in the mind.
In modern Greek all these meanings apply as well as the meaning of
imagining, meditating, reflecting upon.
3. Mi sovvien < from the Latin sub-venio = to resurface, to emerge in the
mind or in memory, to remember (in Italian, sopravvenire/sovvenire, venire
da sotto in su).
Sovvenire < subvenire = to help, to rescue, to provide for;
Succurrere = to come to mind;
Sainte-Beuve: the great age appears to me;
Char: I remember the eternal;
Vaghenas: aish\molai (feel);
Siguro: sukkocio}lai (ponder);
Mi sovvien: to come to mind, to tend upwards and backwards in the hope
of managing to touch, even if only just ever so slightly, the idea of infinite
(see the Greek verb ama-tq]wy).
Deconstructing and Reconstructing Built-up

Landscape in Post-Colonial Literature: Damass Poetry
Antonella Emina
The subject of this text will be the particular drives of the relationship
between landscape in a constructing perspective and post-colonial literature Lon-Gontran Damass poetry in particular but some preliminary themes need to be elaborated before embarking upon our main argument.
Foreword
1. Post-colonial literature is often labelled as deconstruction and postmodernism. This is mainly because of the modernist effects connected
with the world where it was produced. Colonialism was paradoxically a
fulfilment of the common belief of the inevitability of progress and
human emancipation and also the realisation of the orders dream. Nevertheless colonial societies experienced the obscure face of progress and the
reason on which it was based: poverty, violence, insecurity, lack of freedom, and even slavery. Those concepts from which colonialism developed, reason and truth, actually led to the annihilation of the very people
whom those same concepts were supposed to protect and liberate.
This general decor is obviously connected with the literature of the
colonies for its quality of a particular condition of writing, which is neither assumed by literature nor challenged. It was incorporated within the
colonial literature which was denounced by Edouard Glissant as a decalcomania. Though, that was not the case either of post-colonial or the literature of negritude.
Then, from the 1970s, critics (and particularly Glissant) stressed the
concepts of rhizomatic origins of civilisations, borrowed from Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari. This theory was the consequence of the realisation of the obvious existence of plural centres. The idea of a unique
model giving rise to some single, uniquely authoritative standard of culture and truth is rejected as it is in contrast to the experience of the individual who asserts his capacity in being a producer of both civilisation
180
Antonella Emina
and values, in spite of issuing far from a hypothetical centre. This current
of thought about dismantling the mechanisms of modernity could be one
of the basic constituents of this literature and the only ethically acceptable
answer to the conditions of its own origins.
The subject involves many aspects. History, sociology and even psychology join the literary field including various other considerations: for
example, the handling of language relationships with meaning, and questions related to the literariness of a text. In addition, these matters pertain
to the correlation between concepts of representation and creation.
As far as the first term, representation, is concerned the most evident
problems are on one hand the query about the bond between the real object and the represented, and on the other hand, the connection between
the writing conditions, the writing itself and the text. I say object to use a
term wide enough to articulate matters, such as a story or an actual object. The second term, creation, will be dealt with later on. The fact that a
text can be set up as a new body as a result of a re-composition independent of the logic of its origin, must be highlighted.
The starting point would be a statement to the effect that the postcolonial world experiences deconstruction in the wider sense of that
term. It would be felt as the experience of undergoing a rupture, or as
an assumption of plurality as a cognitive, creative strategy. Meant as an
instrument of representation and/or of creation, literariness applies common attitude and the qualities of deconstruction: to itself (seen as a corpus), to its tools (the language) and to its realisations (the texts).
2. I will consider the creation of a landscape within the body of a text by
enlightening its procedures of construction, in the awareness that landscape too may be conceived as a text. As a matter of fact, it is a composite
whole of natural features, of artefacta, and of the observers skill that
emerges in making sense of what appears in his gaze.
I will focus also on other space words, words such as place, home,
country and so on. Landscape sounds different from these words. It
sounds a bit more static and is actually detached from the subject: people
do things in a place, not in a landscape! Home, country and place sound
different in terms of exactness or of individual perception towards its own
space. Each of these kinds of locality can be inhabited as well; landscape
cannot, despite its spatial qualities. It can be observed. It can be acted,
worked, transformed, built upon, managed, but you cannot act, perform,
or work in it. In a sense, it suffers from the postcard complex, although
it has some capacity for interacting. You can recognise it as different from
Deconstructing and Reconstructing Built-up Landscape
181
writing and from the written subject. These are the features which characterise our analysis.
Sus au dvoy: The choice of Damass poetry

Mort au Cancre
au pou
mort au Chancre
au fou
et
sus au dvoy1
I have chosen Damass poetry to conduct my investigation even if the author is better known as a representative of negritude and not of post-colonial literature.
The choice depends on the hypothesis that his poetry includes a series
of characteristics which qualify it as a prodrome of the post-colonial kind.
The first of these qualities is the concept of detour, one of the main arguments of Glissant in the 1980s.2 Whereas Damass dvoy is not only a
man who diverts from the charted course of his life, but also someone
who is unaccustomed to keeping to the straight and narrow. By this,
the word indicates the idea of becoming degraded, de facto of abjection.
The emerging depravation is the scene sketched in the poetic context
of the first part of Black-Label. There, a group of people rages against the
main character, calling him: dvoy, a depraved man; cancre, a good-fornothing fool; pou, a louse; chancre, a cankerous bubo; fou, a madman.
The main character does not care about insults, but he accepts them
with the double aim of showing the profound dissimilarity between his
individualism and the society from which that attitude had been conceived. Thus this fundamental difference does underline the lack of any
bonds between the main character and the others.
Closely related to this kind of expressions of separateness, lots of
meaningful stylistic devices, such as the use of antinomies, the recourse
to at least three languages, the combination of different literary elements
(i. e. narrative fragments and dialogues unusually structured), internal intertextuality, and overlapping linguistic registers, are mentioned. These
registers are sometimes unusual for the poetry of that time: the first of
1
2
Damas 1956, 14 15.

See Glissant 1981, 28 36.
182
Antonella Emina
Damass poems were printed in 1934 and the last are dated 1966. They
were particularly unusual for this kind of poetry written in French but
conceived outside of France. Finally, they were unusual for the unique
perspective from Damass French Guyanese, mixed-blood and middleclass background. All these details frame the clash between ordinary
logic, accepted attitude, collective experience and dominant opinion.
This contest shakes up even verisimilitude by means of a writing strongly
characterised by dissociated, paradoxical logic.
From here to over there

I will chiefly look at Black-Label, the second last volume of Damass poetry. It is a long poem in four parts, where the first person narrative
emerges, telling his/her own story.3 I will consider this Me as a man,
which is more likely to be the principal gender of the poem, even if sometimes it turns out to be a woman. This personage sets himself in two
main places: here and over there. The use of the place adverbs determines
an uncertain location of the action, as their place depends on the situation. So, it happens that action has frontiers which are passing, unpredictable, and sometimes unrecognisable. They certainly underline implied
meaning discontinuities in the semiotic form of space, as argued by
A. J. Greimas in For a Topological Semiotics.4 The two adverbs, here
and there, highlight Greimass argument that a place could be distinguished only within the main opposition of spatial otherness, as a place is entirely defined by what it is not. Thus, in Greimass opinion, its recording
of open-ended disjunction (here vs. there), and the appropriation of a
topie (a significant space) could only be possible by imagining a htrotopie. This embodies a great range of ghosts for most of colonial or early
post-colonial American societies founded on African trade and slavery, including Guyana as a further example.
As instruments used to setup the discourse in the poetry,5 adverbs of
place work by allowing the emergence of essential factors in post-colonial
literature, in particular in Damass poetry, and above all, in the volume,
Black-Label.
3
4
5
See Ricoeur, 1992.

Greimas 1976, 25 54.
Brault 2004, 173.
183
In opposition to the common course in Damass works, here denotes

the place of someone else, strongly marked by difference; while there refers to what is known, to the mother country, to the homeland, to the
native country and, above all, marked by sameness.
Thus, paradoxically, hereness, which could be felt as more cheerful
and safe because when an individual says here he experiences this concept
with his own body, becomes the symbol of a form of otherness, variously
felt and treated. On the contrary, when Damas uses there, he refers to appeasing qualities that are normally not related to otherness, and are by
definition something outside of the senders sensorial occurrence. Lopold Sdar Senghors poetry is an important example of this essential consoling quality. As far as Damas is concerned, we have to verify if he joins
the common ideal of home and native country as a consoling mother.
However, we suspect that matters are more complicated for him. For instance, Senghor discovered his point of reference and balance in a holistic,
mythic vision of an alleged pre-colonial, golden age of Africa. On the
contrary, Damass memories are very far from such cheering topics
which instead pushed him to leave. So, the two main adverbial groups
in Damass poetry are:
HERE ! PLACE OF OTHERNESS
THERE ! HIS OWN PLACE, HOME
In these adverbs, the inner ambiguous spatial meaning is not the only one
that has meaning, but it is related to other factors that define the global
meaning system.
In 1998, Rgis Antoine remarked on the lack of a real poetry on geographical themes in one of his studies on Caribbean literature.6 He wondered when and how a non-exotic, non-mimicking, non-folkloric inner
language could be able to relate the geographical being of the French Caribbean islands.
Even if Damas originates from within the continent, distant from
spatial island views, his work has always been associated with one or
other of the French Central American authors. This assignment will
probably be rectified by critics that start underlining his strict connections with other South American countries, for example, Brazil. More
generally this lack of geographical language is common in French American and ancient colonies that were marked by the slave trade.
6
Antoine 1998, 35 45.
184
Antonella Emina
Through Greimass suggestions, the refusal to conceptualise the signified place-territory-landscape in the signifier place-territory-landscape is
the symptom of misinformation about thereness that is, however, the native place, the mother country. As well, it leads to the inability of defining
here (as the place of other, where, however, he is living). This condition
could suggest that thereness might be eventually dismissed in order to assume sooner or later hereness as homeland.
That is not exactly what happens in Black-Label. In this long poem
the features of the adverb here are so wide-ranging to communicate the
main characters feeling of detachment. Besides, thereness, even if deprived of any consoling quality, is drawn out through evocative details.
Broadly, the adverb here indicates a place having all the features of a
non-place, for instance a bar, which evokes none of the familiar attributes of social relations typical of this kind of place. On the contrary, when
the writer says there, it refers straight back to Cayenne. Therefore, regardless of the lack of representation in contemporary French post-colonial
literature, this poem gives a central role to the spatial domain.
Here: From one bar to another

A bar is not, necessarily, a non-place. It can even be a congregation
place par excellence for a lot of people. It depends upon the circumstances.
As far as the verses quoted below, two aspects are evident: on the one
hand there is the loneliness of the man who frequents a bar but keeps
himself apart from the milieu; on the other hand there is the accentuated
character of a short-stay place:
JAI SAOUL MA PEINE
ce soir comme hier
comme tant et tant
dautres soirs passs
o
de bouge en bouge
o
de bar en bar
o
de verre en verre
jai saoul ma peine7
This location of a bar or a dive (bouge) is not an occasional but a constant

event in the poem, underlined by the recurring refrain quoted below, repeated sixteen times within the eighty-four pages of text:
7
Damas 1956, 14 15.
185
BLACK-LABEL BOIRE
pour ne pas changer
Black-Label boire
quoi bon changer8
The scene of insults quoted above happens in this setting to evoke the
isolation and the decay of conscience through alcohol. This setting of action, which seems less of an actual incident than an ambience, serves to
reconstruct one of either fragments or ghosts that are created by self-censorship. It is as if the main character has dealt himself those injuries. The
issue of Damass self-censorship had started quite a long time before,
from hyper-correct behaviour within colonial and post-colonial societies,
to the individual attitude of obsessive self-control. It is a central theme,
but it is partially unrelated to our current aims.9
The space indicated by here, is sustained by strict place-names such as
Paris, by general terms, such as Town (like Paris), or by representative
places which refer to Paris also by means of a metonymic process: for example, Eiffel tour and the Seine. I would formulate the hypothesis that
even Paris becomes a non-place in Black-Label, because of the lack of
symbolic or lived spaces: the absence of rooms denoting unlucky, clandestine loves as in Nvralgies or the Unknown Soldiers Monument of
Pigments. The only spatial details are related to a fourteen-kilometre Parisian walk linking three points, from Notre-Dame-dAuteuil to Sainttienne-du-Mont, touching rue Daru.
Notre-Dame-dAuteuil is in the 16th arrondissement on the West side
of Paris and glise dAuteuil is also a subway station on Line 10. Sainttienne-du-Mont is another church in the 5th. Rue Daru, instead, is on
the North side of Paris, in the Saint-Honor quarter. This area does
not offer any attributes inciting a sense of belonging or rootedness. As
far as evoking Paris is concerned, it is remarkable how the toponym appears. Usually it is repeated with identical structures, such as in en Paris
Paris Paris / Paris lExil.10 Reiteration produces a dragging effect and it
brings out the final exile.
8 Damas 1956.
9 See Lro 1932, 10 12; and Hoquet and Blanchi in Damas 1972b, 35 38,
59 60.
10 Damas 1956, 10.
186
Antonella Emina
I was born over there, at the end of the World

Opposite to the exile space, a place empty of shared elements, there is the
thereness, over there:
JE SUIS N
disais-tu
tout au bout du Monde
L-BAS
entre Montagne-des-Tgres
et le Fort-Cprou qui regarde la Mer dner de soleil
de paltuviers et dalgues
lheure o
la nuit tombe
sans crier gare au Crpuscule11
These nine lines highlight the connection between the subject and the
landscape, and more, they demonstrate how Damass writing uses geographical, spatial words. Before analysing them in detail let us look at
the Cayenne postcard represented by the quoted lines. It depicts the
Montagne du Tigre, the Fort Cprou, the sea, the mangrove, the seaweeds. The lines evoke the borders of the native town, starting from
the southern one: la Montagne-des-Tigres. In fact the correct place
name is Montagne du Tigre, a hill on the south side of Cayenne with
an altitude less than 300 metres. The word montagne (mountain)
could mislead us because in Guyana altitudes are always very moderate.
So, after having depicted the first border, the lines indicate the northern
one, located at Fort Cprou. This fort is placed on the top of the homonymous mount (105 metres above sea level) from which point it dominates the town of Cayenne from the north-west, in the direction of the
sea. Thanks to this, the site offers a view of the sunset announced by
dner de soleil. In this phrase dner is the evening meal, as we are told
by the precise time indication: lheure o
la nuit tombe, the period
when the night falls every twelve hours, suddenly and without passing
through twilight (sans crier gare au Crpuscule), as is usual in the equatorial zone.
The choice of these two points on the map enables us to trace a route
from the south to the north, but it is not able to present a complete map
of the native country, because this would require two other points of the
compass, without which it is a mere one-dimensional segment. So, the
11 Damas 1956, 61.
187
text does not aim at fully representing a space by giving all the coordinates.
The reasons for this choice of Fort Cprou rather than other interesting sites could be both geographical and historical. As concerns geography, they are probably tied to the distribution of spaces in Cayenne, as
the fort is exactly in front of the most notable square in the town, Place
des Palmistes. The hill emerges on a level, marshy coast, thick with mangrove and seaweed, as realistically evoked in Damass poetry. As concerns
history, they are most likely tied to the foundation of the town. Cprou
marks the beginning of Cayenne history and the conquest of Guyana by
the French: in 1643 Poncet de Brtigny, general lieutenant of King Louis
XIII, purchased the hill where the fort was placed by the Indian Chief
Cprou.
As regards the choice of foregrounding the Tiger Mountain instead of
other possible sites, this could be explained by the evocative qualities of
the word tiger. It is obvious what a tiger is: a feline mammalian carnivore, but it has no place in Guyanese fauna. We are left at a loss to make
any sense of this combination of animal and place. At this point a short
digression on Guyanese toponyms is appropriate. The pre-eminence of
descriptive toponyms12 on the map and in Damass works highlights
the anomaly of the place-name Montagne du Tigre. This disparity is
more marked if it is compared to other place names cited by Damas. I
will point out four examples: lEsplanade,13 Montjoly,14 Oyapock,15 Dgrad-Des-Cannes.16 They all have a fundamentally descriptive character.
The first two instances are unequivocal: the plain, wide, open shape of
Esplanade, which is a square of Cayenne; and the presumably agreeable
topography of Montjoly. As regards the Oyapock, this is the river at the
southern border with Brazil. For most French-speaking readers the word
cannot be understood as readily as the descriptive place name would suggest. However, this is merely a linguistic problem, as the name is formed
12 Lzy 2000, 235 262.
13 [] lombre [] / dune Reine Charlotte en bonnet phrygien fige en lEsplanade (Damas 1956, 66). Ancient name (1821 1841) of Place des Palmistes,
firstly named La Savane. See Ndagano/Chirhalwirwa 2009, 185.
14 On installe dabord les condamns Rmire, rgion situe entre Montjoly et
Cayenne, ville principale. Damas 1938, 42.
15 On lapaise en dirigeant llment pnal entre Kourou et lOyapock. Damas
1938, 42.
16 Du Vieux Dgrad-des-Cannes / tmoin de ce qui fut le temps des Ngriers.
Damas 1956, 66.
188
Antonella Emina
out of an American Indian idiom meaning large river (Waya: river;

pucu: large).17 Once more, as a matter of straightforward descriptive detail and without elaboration, it denotes certain salient features of the site
in question. The fourth example, Dgrad-Des-Cannes, is mainly descriptive as regards the presence of reeds (probably sugar canes) and the ambient conditions for their cultivation. On the other hand, the further information about the territorial organisation as an embarcadero and its
economic configuration does have a certain performative function.18
Before drawing out the implications of these facts, let us come back
to the choice of Montagne-des-Tigres as a coordinate of the Cayenne
map. Its significance here could be treated as condensing the significance
it assumes throughout Damass work. Tiger is one of the most important
characters of five of the nineteen short stories of Veilles noires: Beefsteak, Lenqute, Le sorcier, Astuce, Pche en eau trouble. The author says that he rewrote them after they were orally transmitted to
him by an old Guyanese woman. The books prologue introduces the
protagonists of the stories and their milieu:
Quon veuille bien se rappeler que ces contes ont pris naissance dans les
territoires qui forment le Bassin de lAmazone et que lAmazone arrose les
seules terres du monde qui soient encore inexplores.
On ne stonnera donc pas dy voir survivre le souvenir du temps o
Dieu-leP re, vivant la mani re dun vieux Colon, faisait priodiquement un tour
dinspection personnel sur ses domaines; du temps o
Ravet-le-Cancrelas
pinait fort agrablement les cordes dune guitare; du temps o
Bouc et
Lapin courtisaient la fille dun gros propritaire terrien; du temps o
Tigre
tait loncle de Kariakou-la-Gazelle; du temps o
Chien et Chat cultivaient
de compagnie, du temps o
Tortue nen tait pas une ruse pr s, etc.19
Tiger was the uncle of Kariakou-the-Gazelle! A very strange family! The

citation of the Tiger Mountain together with the Cprou Fort conveys a
deep feeling of belonging by means of folklore in the first case and the
history of the towns founding in the second. Therefore, it could be a
case of the banal opposition (banal not because it is unable to involve
the people concerned, but because it is so obvious) between a place
and a non-place. The place is evidently the convivial site of birth and
memory; the non-place is the neutral cold site of exile, where the individual does not perceive any cultural, emotional or social connection. Furthermore, the use of traditional short stories would enhance its quality
17 Lzy 2000, 240 241.
18 Ndagano/Chirhalwirwa 2009, 227.
19 Damas 1972c, 11.
189
as an anthropological place that is characteristic of an archaic, backward

society, in contrast to modern locations, which are completely devoid of
such character. As a matter of fact, a persons place of birth becomes emblematically a part of their identity. That is the first factor that goes toward the shaping of them as an individual. The relationships established
there, first of all with familiar landmarks, shape him within his historical
locale, so that everyone can find certain and stable points of reference.
The multiple self

This antithesis does not sum up Damass writing completely. It is marked
by a dissociative process of thought and personality toward a new logic,
one that is paradoxical if compared with the starting pattern. I am thinking here of the experience of the main character of Black-Label. The segment of the dialogue, enclosed in the nine lines quoted above and introduced by the two lines JE SUIS N / disais-tu, offers some clues about
this process of dissociation. The outline of the character becomes less and
less clear. While in the previous part of the poem the narrator, the protagonist and the implied author converged into the first person pronoun,
now his attributes shift to a second person, distinct from the narrator.
There is indeed assignment of a different function to two separate voices,
turning the monologue into a dialogue. In it, the two interlocutors (actually the same person) are indicated either by me or you in turn.
So, while landscape rebuilt by memory is composed by several firm
points borne out by history, geography and a life, the individual living
that life is shrouded by a nebula. At first sight, this last word seems
out of context but it is made pertinent by one of the names the narrator
gives to himself: Limb. This is a strange name, formed either on limbe
(the outer part of a celestial body) or on limbes, not in its meaning of
the abode of souls that are, according to Roman Catholic theology, barred
from heaven through not having received Christian baptism, but in its
figurative meanings both of an intermediate or transitional place or
state and a state of uncertainty. Thus, Limb anticipates the other
name that the narrator gives to himself: lyd. This last name implies
the verb lider (to elide) which in classical Latin (elidere) means to
expel, while in common language it means to delete letters from a
word and, in a general sense, conveys an idea of elimination.
Besides, lyd belongs to a semantic field which also includes Exil,
deux voix and deux tres. Exiled, that is expelled, but also dichotomic
190
Antonella Emina
and insane as there are two human beings identifying themselves with a
single name and with a single person. For instance the poem repeats on
several occasions (with small variations) the following idea:
et ma voix clame en Exil
et lExil chante deux voix
et voici LYD20
The above lines always anticipate the following verse, this one likewise
repeated with small variations:
LYD
Je dis bien pour ceux ceux qui nen savent rien
je dis LYD deux tres confondus en un seul
jamais seul
malgr la toute premi re sc ne21
lyd, two human beings confounded in one being, forever alone, could
be considered a way of pointing up some contradiction within the firstperson subject: the immanence and the permanence, the strong subject
declaring his own existence and the weak subject existing merely through
his actions. lyd, two human beings confounded in one being, forever
alone, refers to the very first scene (malgr la toute premi re sc ne), the
scene which determines the first passage from the double to the single.
According to Daniel Maximin,22 the reason for this sense of isolation
can be found in Damass biography, in particular in the death at birth
of his twin sister, Gabrielle. Damas elaborates this event by evoking a
double dimension to the death. Poetry, then, offers the possibility of extending the dimension of singleness to include more than one. This possibility is actually inherent in the use of the first-person pronoun. This
linguistic device also connotes, by way of cultural archetype (the spiritual
union of twins), a particular, individual psychological situation, belonging to that specific life. Thus the fragmentation or the amplification of
the individual marked, as noted above, by detour (depraved, that is,
spoilt, perished and corrupted) should be able to recompose himself in
his native country by experiencing the condition of home insider. Therefore, the landscape outlined above, reconstructed with well known building blocks, is not free from debasement. It is rather the keystone of that
chaotic, tumultuous personality.
20 Damas 1956, 46.
21 Damas 1956, 44.
22 Maximin 1988, without page.
191
The sites that compose that landscape also bear marks of conflict.
They are fairly exotic for a European reader, more or less conceived as
a novel location, like Treasure Island, the Adventure Islands and so on,
or else they are downgraded to their subordinate economic role as producers of particular foodstuffs. Despite the force of this distorting gaze
from outside, the poem exerts less shaping power over the colonial landscape than the debasing insider view (the poet) who lives there.
Ceux qui se traitent eux-mmes de sauvages
sales n gres
soubarous
bois-mitan
gros-sirop
guinains
congos
moudongues
fandangues
nangues 23
This is another list of grievances, which is difficult to translate except for

the first two (savages and niggers). The others are in Creole, come from a
regional idiom, or from a specific language. We could say, more or less,
boors, savages again, residual syrup These grievances are stronger
than those quoted above: depraved man, good-for-nothing fool,
louse, cankerous bubo and madman, because they witness the lowest
self-estimate and they articulate a commonplace form of self-destructive
behaviour.
The reconstruction
Damass writing presents a powerful analysis of the fatal experience of destruction and self-destruction in addition to anxiety, tiredness, fear, hopelessness and a deep feeling of sadness and emptiness (all these feelings are
referred to in Black-Label).
POURQUOI EN VOULOIR TOUS CEUX DONT JE SUIS
qui retrouvent enfin
le fil du drame interrompu
au bruit lourd des chanes
du brigantin frle
23 Ndagano/Chirhalwirwa 2009, 189 216.
192
Antonella Emina
mouillant dans laube grise de lAnse aux KLOUSS

MASKILILIS24
So, this is not the mechanism of the surrealist automatisms but a lucid
psychosis that is a paradoxical oxymoron based on the practice of dissociation in the writing as the chance to weave new creative ties renewing
the relationship with the real. An original mode of reconstruction
makes this concrete through an analytic drive that is necessarily deconstructive but is motivated by an awareness of the fragmentation physically
perceived as an experience both of psychic dissociation and of otherness.
According to the final quotation, re-composition is carried in the context
of Anse aux KLOUSS MASKILILIS (cited six times in the poem) that is
a turning point, similar to many others in Guyanese literature. This one is
haunted by evil spirits which make the unfortunate traveller, met on the
way, insane and dumb. They become insane and silent like those men
chained in slave ships which had docked there. The relentless pain is centred on that original rupture that colonial American societies had suppressed for a long time and that Damas, the first in French colonial
and post-colonial literature, recognised, stripped down and reassembled
in his texts. Damass writing is built upon the need to analyse and dismantle the pillars and structure of French colonialism that is the will
to assimilate heterogeneous groups and individuals according to the colonial model. This model was considered the only one capable of carrying
out a civilising mission. Conversely, all other practices were judged barbaric and unacceptably archaic in the modern world. The results of
such a suppression have been studied in detail by historians and sociologists but have also been taken into account by psychiatry.
This essay has insisted rather on how marginal literature deals with
the subject, moving from the evidence of Damass disconnected, syncopated, grotesque texts. In particular, it highlights the unavoidable need
for a clarificatory breaking-down as a starting point for advancing ideas
about the individual and his or her placement in the world. Thus, individual identity became aware of itself when it was directly confronted
with French metropolitan society. In those circumstances the natural givens, such as the colour of the skin, the most apparent of personal features,
made the colonised a marginalised man, even a pariah. At any rate, this is
the role the author gives to his main character; and more, he makes this
individual existence part of a wider experience concerning the whole
24 Damas 1956, 73 74.
193
Guyanese social body and even all French American societies founded
upon the slave trade. So, Damas highlights episodes retained within his
groups memory and, by this means, he rebuilds a history which challenges the official colonial one. Moreover, despite the writers genuine rejection of the comforting idea of homeland, the scrupulous location of all
the characters actions and memories points up the interaction between
identity and place. It is not only the indication of the place of birth on
a passport, but it actually seems to be essential to shape memories, consciously taken up in order to build the characters stratified personality.
Damass poetry, like many post-colonial literary works, puts forward a
sort of laboratory of constructed identities matching them to places.
In this sense, Damass poetry and post-colonial literature could be considered in terms of reconstruction. They really make up a new body rejecting
the imposed unity and discovering blacked-out historical passages, a new
body founded on multicentred geography and diversity.
Section III
The Genealogy and Legacy of
Deconstruction:
The Politico-Social and Juridical
Point of View
Remembrance of Nature within the Subject:

Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis and the Limits
of Subjection
Jordi Maiso
At the beginning of his lectures on Philosophical Terminology, Theodor W.
Adorno remarked that every philosophical term was the hardened scar of
an unsolved problem.1 Maybe no term could attest to the validity of this
assertion better than the philosophical category of subjectivity. Subjectivity was once the epicentre of modern thought until, in the second half of
the past century, postmodern discourses started to regard this category
with distrust. Due to the increasing awareness of the importance of social
structures and discourses, subjectivity has been deconstructed, most of its
claims have been re-dimensioned and the subject itself has even been declared dead. Authors like Lvi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault or Althusser converged in their understanding of subjectivity as a mere appearance, a naivet of modern thought which should be subjected to the ruthless critique of demythologising theory. But in the past few decades subjectivity
has turned out to be a main issue, in philosophy as well as in the social
sciences; it seems that subjectivity has only survived its own death as an
unsolved problem: the current debates on subjection and subjectification
reveal subjectivity may not be thought about without domination. Its emphatic claims of sovereignty, autonomy and freedom have only existed as
a regulative idea; their materialisation was missed, although their appearance is still reproduced in the social process.
In order to establish possible frames to reconstruct subjectivity after
its deconstruction, it may be worthwhile looking back to the meeting
of two major demythologisers of modern subjectivity before postmodern
thought: Theodor W. Adorno and Sigmund Freud. By focusing on Adornos reception of Freud, I intend to argue that the cooperation of critical
social theory and psychoanalysis may lead to a fruitful insight into the
way in which the social relationships of domination and servitude
shape the material constitution of subjects. Careful analysis of Adornos
1
Adorno 1974, 10 f.
198
Jordi Maiso
work might offer a valuable approach to the internalisation of domination and its limits, enriching the current debates on subjection and subjectification.
Back to Adorno: Subjectivity in the administered world

The claim to look back to an old some may say outdated philosopher like Theodor W. Adorno may sound surprising in the frame of contemporary debates. But Adorno might be revealed as an interesting author to interface the discussions on deconstruction and reconstruction.
His whole oeuvre can be interpreted as an attempt to understand the further implications of irreversible transformations in the instruments of
perception, interpretation and thought throughout the past century. No
doubt some of his analyses may sound distant from current philosophical
matters; Adorno himself conceived his work as a theory which attributes
a temporal core to truth instead of contrasting truth as something invariable to the movement of history.2 But this very insistence on its temporal core may make Adorno relevant for contemporary issues: his thought
might offer an insightful perspective concerning the historical genesis of
the current debates.
It is well known that Adorno understood his own work in the wider
frame of the collective project developed around the Institut fr Sozialforschung, today known as the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.
Under the direction of Max Horkheimer, a group of theorists and intellectuals started to develop an extensive critical analysis of society and its
transformations; their founding premise was the acknowledgment that
the end of the bourgeois era would not lead as Marx had expected
to the triumph of human history over pseudo-natural constraint, but
would instead entail a social formation that was both a consequence
and a continuation of its old heteronomy, but in a different shape. Horkheimer and Adorno called this new era the administered world. This
term pointed out the specific differences between the new social formation and the old, bourgeois one: free individual action had no place to
develop, rationality could only make claims on the enhancement of organisation and the technical improvement of social domination and the
category of the individual seemed about to be abrogated. Auschwitz,
the German name for a Polish location in which civilisation turned to fe2
Horkheimer/Adorno 2002, xi.
Remembrance of Nature within the Subject
199
rocious barbarism, marked for Adorno the historical point of no return

between both ages: it revealed a new position of living subjects within society, in which every causal relation between what an individual does and
what happens to him seemed to be wiped out.3 In the new social configuration, categories such as subjectivity, freedom, autonomy or sovereignty
seemed to lose their historical and social ground. Nevertheless, in order to
remain critical, Adornos theory could not give up its emancipatory
claims: instead it had to strive for possible materialisation within the administered world. What was at stake was not the conservation of the past
but the fulfilment of past hopes.4
This assertion indicates a possible framework for the reconstruction
of subjectivity after its deconstruction: this cannot be understood as
the impossible restoration of already demythologised thoughts. In fact,
Adornos own attempt to critically salvage subjectivity was fully aware
that this was not a given fact, but a task which had to be redefined in
the given social and historical situation and which had to be fulfilled
within it. That is the reason why he claimed that the construction of
the self is the most advanced issue of civilization, which civilization
never fulfilled completely.5 But Adorno also knew the socio-historical
structures and practices did not only shape living individuals, but also
had to be internalised by them. In fact his analysis of the process of internalisation of social constraint may offer new keys for understanding
the dialectics between subjection and subjectification. In spite of the
commonplaces about Adornos incurable negativism, his emphasis on
the natural-psychological dispositions of living subjects may reveal a
higher degree of potential resistance within them than is usually assumed.
Adorno himself had noticed that he who wishes to know the truth about
life in its immediacy must scrutinize its estranged form, the objective
powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses.6 Thus there exists the need to examine the processes which take place
3
4
5
6
What perished there was that which had provided the criterion of experience
life lived out to its end. Adorno 1983, 260.
Horkheimer/Adorno 2002, xvii. The result was an ambiguous relationship with
the old bourgeois world, which intended a critique of the fine appearance of
humanity in bourgeois false consciousness, but defending at the same time its
moment of truth, the manifestation of real humanity, against that new element
which delineated itself already in the old one: the sheer inhumanity. Stender
1996, 82.
Horkheimer/Adorno 1985, 592.
Adorno 2005a, 15.
200
Jordi Maiso
in the conscious and unconscious minds of individuals. That is the reason

why the inner logic of critical social theory, for Adorno as well as for most
of the Frankfurt School, led almost unavoidably to a careful confrontation with the only theory of the subject which could structurally fulfil
the challenge of offering a new insight into the constitution of subjectivity and its outer conditioning: the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud.
Critical theory meets Freud:

The contradiction within the subject
For the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, Freud was not only a
late representative of a demythologising tradition of thought, but also the
author who offered the main keys for understanding why civilisation
failed once more to provide emancipation and subjective autonomy.
His work seemed to reveal, in an incontrovertible manner, the entwinement between emancipation and repression. Freuds thesis in Civilization
and its Discontents (1930) pointed out that the mastery of nature not only
involved the liberation from outer constraint an expectation which
takes root on the classical distinction between res cogitans and res extensa
but was also inextricably linked to renunciation, sacrifice and repression
of the nature within the subject itself. In the words of Hullot-Kentor:
In mastering the world, the self progressively deprives itself of itself and of its
own object. All it ultimately gets to enjoy is a fascination with the techniques
of mastery that provide an hallucinated feeling of sovereignty more than any
real control.7
After Freud, the self could not pretend to be the master of its own house,
and this had far-reaching implications for the social logics of domination
and servitude.
The project of Adorno and his fellow-thinkers was to further develop
the contributions of the Freudian theory in order to gain a critical insight
into social processes without falling into the trap of psychologism. For, as
Horkheimer himself stated, Freuds psychoanalysis delivered the fundamental keys to a theory of man as he has developed under the conditions
of antagonistic society: it enabled a focus on the introjection of social
constraint and how it affected the so-called psychological life,8 including
7
8
Hullot-Kentor 2008.
Horkheimer 1996, 367.
201
the thoughts and actions resulting from it. Therefore, their approach to
psychoanalysis was marked by their commitment to a materialistic tradition of thought: the appeal of psychoanalysis was for them not because it
offered interpretative patterns which may be applied to cultural, social or
political phenomena, but rather that it offered an insight into the contradictions within living individuals which arose in the process of becoming
a self. As a result, the cooperation of social theory and psychoanalysis
could enable us to grasp how the transition from the bourgeois to the
administered world affected the self, as it was intended as the meeting
point of outer and inner life.
It is well known that Freud had revealed the psychical life of the individual as a battleground: the outright conflicts between the id, ego and
superego enabled a deeper understanding of individual drives, motives
and consciousness, revealing some blind spots in the classical philosophy
of the subject. Beyond the superficial integrity of the self, he uncovered
the violent clash between subjective necessities, instinctual energy searching for gratification and the need for adaptation to the pre-existent, outer
reality. The instinctual dynamics revealed that the constitution of the ego
was the result of the struggle between the libidos claim for immediate
gratification the pleasure principle and the social limitations that,
in the shape of prohibitions, were imposed from the outer world as a condition of the subjects self-preservation the reality principle. The constitution of the ego implied, therefore, the introjection of outer limitations
and constraints, which enabled a separation from the libidinal drives to
become an organised self capable of transforming its own impulses in
order to be purposeful. Throughout this process, the ego becomes an instance of reality-testing, of adaptation; in this kind of instance, it is supposed to repress, tame and reject the instincts which may endanger its
successful integration into the given socio-historical reality, otherwise
the instinct would break down every dam and wash away the laboriously
erected work of civilization.9 As Adorno and Horkheimer noticed, the
process of the constitution of the self was a laborious and painful one:
Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self the
identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings was
created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood.10
In some cases the process could generate a frustration which could lead to
compensations or neuroses; in the words of Freud:
9 Freud 1989c, 312.
10 Horkheimer/Adorno 2002, 26.
202
Jordi Maiso
Human beings fall ill as a result of a conflict between the claims of instinctual life and the resistance which arises within them against it; and not for a
moment have we forgotten this resistance, repelling, repressing agency,
which we thought of as equipped with its special forces, the ego instincts,
and which coincides with the ego of popular psychology.11
For Freud the ego seems, thus, to be both: the instance of repression and
the addressee of repression itself. As a result, the concept of the ego is
dialectical, both psychic and extrapsychic, a quantum of libido and the
representative of outside reality.12 The self thus appears as a split entity,
which on the one side fulfils certain social functions and roles and, on the
other side, is a living being, substratum of individual psychology, with its
dispositions and necessities. This contradiction within the subject, as a social and natural being at once, offered Adorno and his colleagues the key
to grasp the dialectical process of individuation and socialisation. For
Freuds atomistic concentration on the depths of individual psychology,
in spite of his apparent biologism, offered an insight as to how social
constraint was introjected by living individuals, shaping their inner
life.13 If as Freud has claimed libido was a pre-social, quasi-natural
instance within the subject, the social principle of domination coincided
with the repression of inner drives, and this enabled the disclosure of a
way in which the relations between domination and servitude were constituted and fixed during the process of becoming a self. But for Freud the
entwinement of civilisation and repression was not only valid at an individual level, but also at a phylogenetical one: culture and social institutions were, for him, based on the domestication of the demands of the
pleasure principle, on the subjugation of human instincts; and yet, as
Freud himself stated, these were only the expression of subjective needs.
For living subjects, superseding the pleasure principle with the reality
principle, which meant no less than the acceptance of the impossibility of
the full and painless gratification of its needs, is a traumatic event. It is
experienced as a situation of Lebensnot, of scarcity in the struggle for existence of every individual: in order to survive in the given reality, they
must accept and internalise the imposition of restraints, renunciations
and delays, renouncing the unrestrained gratification of their needs.
The acknowledgment of this incompatibility between the subjective necessities of individuals and the outer world from which they happen to
11 Freud 1989c, 57.
12 Adorno 2003f, 70.
13 Adorno 2003c, 35; Marcuse 2005, 6.
203
depend caused what Freud called a narcissistic scar in living individuals.14 This insight into the social process of individuation as a process
guided by a structurally sacrificial logic, which implied suffering and frustration, was crucial for Adornos interest in psychoanalysis. For it seems to
take sides on behalf of the substratum which was socially repressed and
denied; Freud himself had written that a civilisation which leaves so
large a number of its participants unsatisfied may not deserve a lasting
existence.15 In fact civilisation could domesticate the nature within the
subject, but it could neither fully satisfy its demands nor make them disappear: the claims of the pleasure principle remain present in the conflicts between the id and the superego and the outer reality, and the narcissistic scar could never fully heal.
In fact, according to Otto Fenichel, the longing to attain once again
the status which preceded this injury to self-regard persists throughout
life, manifesting itself as a narcissistic need.16 As Adorno himself remarked, it may not have been perchance that after the First World
War Freud turned his attention to narcissism and ego problems in the
specific sense.17 This had to be understood in the frame of Freuds theory
of civilisation based on the growth of discontent and destructiveness
within the civilised world.18 Without devoting himself to the study of social developments, the development of Freuds work seemed to point to
historical trends. The diagnosis of the increasing malaise within modern
societies, which took the shape of increasing narcissistic injuries and
needs produced in modern socialisation, seemed to offer Adornos critical
theory some crucial keys for grasping the historical destiny of subjectivity
in a transformed social reality.
14 The early efflorescence of infantile sexual life is doomed to extinction because its
wishes are incompatible with reality and with the inadequate stage of development which the child has reached. That efflorescence comes to an end in the
most distressing circumstances and to the accompaniment of the most painful
feelings. Loss of love and failure leave behind them a permanent injury to selfregard in the form of a narcissistic scar, which in my opinion [] contributes
more than anything to the sense of inferiority which is so common in neurotics. Freud 1989a, 21 f.
15 Freud 1989d, 17.
16 Fenichel 1954, 141.
17 Adorno 2003b, 410 f.
18 See Freud 1989a.
204
Jordi Maiso
Total subjection as the reification of the living subject

For Adorno, Freud had revealed the subjective costs of adaptation and introjection of social restraint, and he had grasped civilisation from the perspective of its effect on living individuals. But the transition to the administered world seemed to supersede the Freudian frame of analysis.
Freuds monadological interest of individual psychology was a product
of the liberal-bourgeois society, in which the individual still played a decisive role. The transition to the administered world meant the decline of
the individual and the weakening of its social position. In the emerging
social constellation, critical social theory had to face the consequences of
the increase in vulnerability and dependence of its subjects, and this demanded a different theoretical perspective: The pre-bourgeois world
does not know psychology yet, the totally administered one does not
know it anymore,19 claimed Adorno; and, in the words of Marcuse:
Psychology could be elaborated and practiced as a special discipline as long as
the psyche could sustain itself against the public power, as long as privacy
was real, really desired, and self-shaped; if the individual has neither the ability nor the possibility to be for himself, the terms of psychology become the
terms of the societal forces which define the psyche.20
At stake was the transition from the anthropology of the bourgeois era to
a new social construction which involved an irreversible transformation of
subjectivity and individuality. The transformation of the historical world
also implied a mutation of the instinctive life. The socialisation web had
expanded, functionalising both outer and inner life, and the mediating
instances between social imperatives and isolated individuals such as
the family tended to lose their classical role in favour of collective, socialised entities such as radio, film and television.21 In this new model of
socialisation, the limits between outer and inner reality tended to vanish;
the relative unity, continuity and substantiality of the modern self if it
ever was more than an ideological postulate was deprived of its basis;
the pursuit of individual interests were substituted for a realism which
only allowed for the seeking of gaps and chose the lesser evil in the allpervading social web of functionalisation; continuity of experience
seemed to break down, reducing human beings to a unit of atomised reactions in order to fulfil changing social demands. There was an unpre19 Adorno 2003f, 83.
20 Marcuse 2005, xxi.
21 Marcuse 2005, 97.
205
cedentedly drastic contrast between the concentration of social power and

the powerlessness of weakened individuals. Therefore, Adorno claimed
the antagonism between the social, technological and economic apparatus
for the reproduction of life and living individuals had reached its very
limit: It has now become fate and finds its expression in what Freud
called ubiquitous, free-flowing anxiety.22 This concentration of social
power asphyxiated the conflicts between libido and adaptation, which
were central to the constitution of the ego and to the classical concept
of the self: introjection of social constraint now became a sheer product
of fear, a matter of self-preservation which demanded an unprecedented
degree of renunciation. Therefore, it should not surprise us that Adorno
spoke of this social tendency as the historical and psychological failure of
subjectivity.23
According to Adorno as well as Horkheimer and Marcuse in the
new social configuration individuals did not live their own life any more,
but only fulfilled social functions and roles. They had to mould themselves to the technical apparatus of the body and soul, transferring
their libido to socially approved issues from technological devices to
identifying with social roles which implied an impoverishment of
thought, no less than of experience. Adaptation to this social reality
meant reification, and this was now a duty the subject himself had to fulfil: The more faithful it becomes to reality, the more it becomes a thing,
the less it actually lives, the more senseless its entire realism becomes.24
As the web of social functionalisation expanded, allowing very little to escape its mesh, inner socialisation significantly deprived living individuals
of every sort of spontaneity: they were reduced to a merely reactive condition. The process of inner socialisation selected, developed and modified some psychological dispositions in order to respond to social imperatives, while others were declared dysfunctional, and were therefore repressed:
The more complex and sensitive the social, economic, and scientific mechanism, to the operation of which the system of production has long since
attuned the body, the more impoverished are the experiences of which the
body is capable. The elimination of qualities, their conversion into functions, is transferred by rationalized modes of work to the human capacity
for experience, which tends to revert to that of amphibians.25
22
23
24
25
Adorno 2003e, 369.

Adorno 2003a, 29.
Adorno 2003f, 60.
Horkheimer/Adorno 2002, 28.
206
Jordi Maiso
Some aspects of this analysis may vaguely seem to anticipate postmodern

theories of power and subjection; but, before assessing similarities it
could be useful to focus on the subtle differences, for they may turn
out to have major repercussions. For the description of a social-disciplinary system, articulated in different institutions (hospitals, mental asylums, schools, universities, factories or prisons) which shaped the body
and behaviour of human beings according to the imperatives of social
domination, did not explain how these imperatives were introjected
and reconciled with the individuals own wishes and expectations. The
postmodern diagnosis of the death of the subject proceeds here much
too literally: it approaches living human beings as if they were only products of social devices, structures and discourses. On the contrary, Adornos
insistence on the unresolved contradiction within the subject blocked any
approach to subjectification processes in a pre-emptive and unilateral
manner. To be sure, with the expansion of inner socialisation, the psychological substratum of the individual may be reduced to a mere curiosity,26 but it still could not be fully functionalised. If Freud had stated
that the experience of the incompatibility of the subjects wishes with reality left a narcissistic scar, Adorno described the individual character as a
system of scars, that are integrated only through suffering and even then
never completely.27 These scars were the traces of the violent imposition
of social imperatives on the life of individuals, which reduced them to
mere objects not subjects of social processes. As a momento of past
suffering and renunciation, these scars were an ambivalent phenomenon:
they were a possible catalyst for non-conformism,28 as well as a potential
source of resentment and its destructive consequences.29
In their analysis of the contradiction within the subject, Adorno and
the Frankfurt School tended to minimise the subjective capacity to resist
the imposition of social imperatives: in their writings this resistance appears mostly as an expression of subjective damage, articulated in desperate reactions or helpless grimaces. But their sociological analysis of phenomena such as authoritarianism, anti-Semitism and guilt had sharpened
their awareness of the subtle dangers of an adaptation which injured the
subjects self-regard and was a great potential source of resentment. In a
highly rationalised society, the ego, which had to take care of its own li26
27
28
29
Adorno 2003f, 60.

Adorno 2003c, 24.
Marcuse 2005, 96 f.
See Stender 1996.
207
bidinal needs and self-preservation, was incessantly under the pressure of

excessive demands. The social weakening of individuals reinforced their
narcissistic need: their inner equilibrium depended more than ever on
the social environment, its recognition and gratification.30 Living subjects
tend to abandon their capacities of experience, judgment and dissent, reinforcing authoritarian and infantile patterns of behaviour. As highly rationalised society could neither sublimate subjective needs nor satisfy
them, the weakened subjects searched for compensations to alleviate
their very antagonism toward the social apparatus and facilitate the introjection of social constraint: Since the reigning objectivity is objectively
inadequate to the individuals, it is realized solely through the individuals
that is to say, psychologically.31
This seems to close the circle of social domination, for the weakened,
needy subjects are always able to find good reasons for not resisting the
pressure to conform. Their libidinal economy seeks relief for the suspension of their anxieties and to give their lives the appearance of being
meaningful. In the all-pervading social functionalisation, they are always
able to find compensations which appeal to their unmet needs and functionalise them. This promises to loosen up their repressions and to let
their unconscious instincts emerge removing the libidinal energies from
the interests of the ego and subordinating them to the requirements of
social imperatives. These vicarious gratifications from identification
to the displacement of libido to socially approved objects such as technological devices or products of the culture industry seem to complete the
system of subjection: they are based on the mobilisation of preconscious
and subconscious elements, which are retained in the unconscious instead
of being helped to reach consciousness: defense mechanisms are strengthened instead of dissolved and living individuals are kept dependent rather
than helped to reach autonomy.
As a result, living individuals seem to become objects of themselves:
wishes coming from their own body and soul tend to appear as obstacles
to successful adaptation, they have to be tamed or brought under control
in order to respond to social demands. The only available promise of
happiness seems to demand abandoning their own subjectivity; the consequence is the travesty of a compromise between the pleasure principle
and the reality principle: the perfect accomplishment of social conformity.
30 See Fenichel 1954.
31 Adorno 2005b, 351.
208
Jordi Maiso
The limits of subjection:

Towards a reconstitution of subjectivity
The combination of critical social theory and psychoanalysis in Adornos
thought does not only enable a deconstruction of the social web of delusion: it also helps to recognise its limits. This may be its most important
contribution to the current debates on subjection and subjectification.
The mere assertion that social discourses, dispositives and structures
shape the practices and cognitive instruments of the subject only grasps
one very partial aspect of their performativity. The whole process of
the introjection of social constraints remains unaccounted for; no attention is paid to the interaction between society and nature within the subject or to the whole psychological dynamic which subjection sets in motion. This means ignoring the very libidinal life of the subject, its permanent claim for gratification and removal of suffering, which may lead to
unrecognised friction in the logics of domination and servitude. Freud
himself had grasped the materiality of these processes with notable precision. In fact he spoke of compensation phenomena precisely those
of a social nature as crooked cures,32 for they mitigated the injuries
produced in the socialisation processes, establishing an appearance of harmony between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Adorno interpreted this process of vicarious gratification as socialized narcissism;
its schema was that of rationalisation.
In narcissism the self-preserving function of the ego is, on the surface, maintained, but it has been split-off from consciousness and entrusted to irrationality. Every defense mechanism has a narcissistic cachet: the ego notices its
weakness in front of the drive as well as his powerlessness as narcissistic illness. The resistance is not consciously performed and is hardly accomplished
by the ego, but rather by a psycho-dynamic derivate, a contaminated libido,
directed to the ego, but unsublimated and undifferentiated.33
Accordingly, social psychology should not be in the first place psychology

of the ego, but psychology of the libido and its mutable dynamics: for the
constitutive mechanisms of the ego are extremely fragile. Adorno was not
interested in a psychologistic interpretation of social phenomena or in a
cognitive psychology of socialisation; what he found in Freud was the discovery of a dynamic substratum of impulses, drives, resistances and frictions which subsisted below the surface of individuation. This enabled a
32 Freud 1989b, 95.
33 Adorno 2003f, 72 f.
209
new insight into the social production of consciousness and the unconscious, which interpreted the ego as a field of tensions between domination and servitude, emancipation and repression. For psychology is not
just relevant as a medium of adaptation, but also there, where the socialization within the subject reaches its limits.34 This meant that the total
functionalisation of subjectivity could not be fully achieved, for the natural, pre-social residue within living individuals represented the insurmountable limit of their inner socialisation: the undissolved remainder
of nature within the subject which can never be fully assimilated. The dialectic between the introjection of social imperatives and the psychological dispositions revealed the subjection of living individuals and their
needs could not be met without generating resistances since the resultant
conflict persists, however rationalised and displaced.
We could say that subjection reaches its limits in the very non-identity of subjects with themselves. On this account, Adornos diagnosis of a
socio-historical annihilation of the individual is to be understood as indicating a real tendency of late capitalism, but not as a consummated
process: otherwise the authoritarian personality would be little more
than a mere metaphor.35 In fact, it is no wonder that Adorno grasped
the insurmountable limit of subjection and functionalisation in what
he considered to be the most effective and powerful apparatus of inner
socialisation the culture industry:
Since as subjects human beings themselves still represent the ultimate limit
of reification, mass culture must try and take hold of them again and
again: the bad infinity involved in this hopeless effort is the only trace of
hope that this repetition might be in vain, that human beings cannot be totally controlled.36
In order to fully achieve the incorporation of the subject, the social apparatus had to reach out for them over and over again: and this implied that
total functionalisation of living individuals could never be fully achieved.
Society needs subjects in order to reproduce itself at least a fiction of
the self as owner of commodities or as subject of consumption and
thus the circle of domination cannot be fully closed.
The experience of this insurmountable limit of subjection proves that
the historical weakening of subjectivity did not necessarily mean abandoning its emancipatory claims, for these could be reconstructed on
34 Adorno 2003d, 92.
35 Parin 1978, 120.
36 Adorno 2001, 93.
210
Jordi Maiso
the basis of the residue of nature within the subject.37 Above all, this implied self-reflection on the subjects own fragility and needy condition for
it was this vulnerability which led to: the vicious circle of powerlessness,
the need for adaptation and belonging, the introjection of constraint,
frustration and the off-loading of aggression which perpetuated the social
logic of violence. Rather than blindly allowing this logic to rule the life of
individuals, their own scars and frustrations had to become the source of
consciousness and knowledge: the self had to reflect upon its own somatic and libidinal basis and try to help the id find satisfaction instead of passively succumbing to it. This offered a possible, although extremely fragile basis for the salvage of subjectivity: Without an anamnesis of the untamed impulse, that precedes the ego an impulse later banished to the
zone of unfree bondage to nature it would be impossible to derive the
idea of freedom, although this idea in turn ends up reinforcing the ego.38
However, this remembrance of nature within the subject, which
marked the limits of subjection, implied also an acknowledgment of
the limits of Enlightenment itself: self and consciousness could no longer
be conceived as self-transparent entities. Freudian psychoanalysis had
shown the ego would never be able to fully master its libidinal energies
and channel them into a perfectly cognitive, self-reflective behaviour
which was the basic assumption of Habermass shift in critical theory,
from philosophy of consciousness to intersubjective communication.39
According to Adorno, the self-reflection of the ego on its own libidinal
dimension could not restore an identical self, but only commemorate
the non-identical in the subject, a libidinal substratum which is frequently alien in meaning and opaque to reason. The goal was thus to strengthen the experience of the inner split within the subject and try to restore
this foreign land within itself, mending the damage caused by an impoverished model of rationality which constrains individuals within a vicious
circle of domination, self-denial and dependence. Although Adornos
thought might be in many aspects outdated, this emancipatory claim remains valid, for it is still unfulfilled. No reconstruction of the subject can
afford to neglect this consciousness of the non-identity of subjectivity
with itself. The joint venture of critical social theory and psychoanalysis
is still of great value for seeing through the social web of delusion and
breaking the spell of conformity. For, as Detlev Claussen has remarked,
37 Horkheimer/Adorno 2002, 32.
38 Adorno 2005b, 221 f.
39 Habermas 1985. See for instance vol. 2, 374 f.
211
remembrance and reflection, as intellectual efforts, may give the individuals back some of the sovereignty they lost under the social pressure to
conform.40
40 Claussen 2000, 21.
The Rise of Political Agonism and its Relation to

Deconstruction: The Case of Chantal Mouffe
Herman W. Siemens
This paper will examine political agonism in relation to deconstruction.
In the last 15 years or so, certain democratic theorists (Chantal Mouffe,
William Connolly, Bonnie Honig, inter alia) have used deconstruction to
formulate powerful critiques of liberal-democratic theory, but also alternative theories of democracy that give a central place to tension and antagonism in democratic politics (Section 1). While claiming to derive
their criticisms and alternatives from the deconstructive logic of the constitutive outside, this derivation is problematic (Section 2), so that political agonism is best understood as a reconstructive reaction to deconstruction that is not without its difficulties, but also holds some promise as a
way to rethink pluralistic democracy in the 21st century (Section 3). In
this paper, I will concentrate on one agonistic theorist: Chantal Mouffe.
Of value in her approach to democracy, I will argue, are three key elements: anti-essentialism; the demand for an ontology that does justice
to contemporary forms of pluralism; and the claim that pluralism is inseparable from antagonism.
1. The provenance of political agonism

In broad terms political agonism emerged from a dissatisfaction with the
state of democratic politics today (a) and mainstream democratic theory
(b).
a. In response to the bureaucratic, law- and rule-induced sclerosis of
contemporary democracies, agonists seek to recuperate the original sense
of a vibrant democracy as contestation. What worries Mouffe is the loss of
contestation in the sense of adversarial left vs. right politics that accompanied the rise of Centrist politics: the so-called Third Way (Blair, Clinton, Schrder). In displacing the adversary with an imaginary consensus
of the centre, Mouffe argues, they expelled any legitimate opposition
214
Herman W. Siemens
from the democratic public sphere.1 More broadly, agonistic democrats

are left-leaning, Foucault-inspired theorists concerned with the persistent
inequalities in contemporary democracies, with minority groups that remain marginalised and below the threshold of legitimate identity and political participation.2 In practical terms, then, their question is: How to
empower those marginalised in their emancipatory struggle against inequality? How to theorise democracy so as to allow for legitimate
forms of resistance or opposition to existing power-regimes in current democracies?
b. This dissatisfaction extends to mainstream democratic theory. The
1970s and 1980s saw the rise of deliberative theories of democracy. Reacting against the aggregative theories of democracy that came to dominate
after the Second World War the reduction of democratic theory to a
descriptive account of the procedures needed to secure compromises between diverse interest-groups deliberative theorists sought to restore a
normative dimension to democratic theory by emphasising processes of
deliberation among free and equal citizens. John Rawls and Jrgen Habermas are the figureheads of the two main schools of deliberative theory.
What unites them is the effort to formulate a concept of Public Reason
that is normative: one that can secure the legitimacy of democratic institutions by ensuring that all decisions are the result of an exchange of arguments among free and equal rational citizens, citizens who reach a rational consensus that is maximally inclusive, because it represents an impartial
standpoint that is equally in the interests of all.3 Dissatisfaction with these
theories is expressed in extensive and varied criticisms of deliberative theories presented by agonists. In this context, I will concentrate on one of
the two key criticisms formulated by Mouffe. (1) The pluralism criticism is
that the notion of a universal public reason deployed in deliberations oriented toward consensus fails to address adequately the character of pluralism in contemporary democracy. The notion of pluralism at stake here is
both descriptive and normative: something we have both to acknowledge
and promote.4 (2) The power criticism is that the deliberative ideal of an
all-inclusive public sphere in which power-relations are displaced by a
non-coercive consensus among rational agents fails to grasp the nature
1
2
3
4
Mouffe 2005, 14.

Connolly 2007, 144; Mouffe 2005, 6, 20; Honig 1993, 14; Villa 2000, 225.
Mouffe 2005, 45 f, 81 f.
Mouffe 2005, 17, 19, 33 f; Connolly 2007, 4; Honig 1993, 130.
The Rise of Political Agonism and its Relation to Deconstruction
215
of power-relations (subordination, exclusion) as constitutive of all socialpolitical relations and identities.5

The key to both criticisms and to the alternative theories of democracy proposed by agonists is the view that conflict and division are inherent to politics.6 More specifically, the claim is that antagonism, struggle,
contestation, disagreement and dissensus are ineradicable, a daily and incessant part of democratic politics; but, also that they are desirable a valuable (emancipatory, productive) feature of democracy, to be affirmed
and celebrated, because they make genuine pluralism possible and are essential for questioning, resisting and transforming power-relations. Thus,
behind the pluralism criticism is the claim that genuine pluralism is always
antagonistic and dissensual.7 Behind the power criticism is the claim that
modern liberal democracy when properly understood creates a space
in which [] power relations are always being put into question and no
victory can be final.8 Radical and plural democracy means:
[t]o acknowledge the existence of relations of power and the need to transform them, while renouncing the illusion that we could free ourselves completely from power []. [T]he specificity of modern pluralist democracy
[] does not reside in the absence of domination and of violence but in
the establishment of a set of institutions through which they can be limited
and contested. To negate the ineradicable character of antagonism and to
aim at a universal rational consensus this is the real threat to democracy.9
In short: Mouffe and other agonists have an antagonistic concept of pluralism and power in democracy.
2. Deconstruction and political agonism

What is striking is that these are not so much empirical claims, as conceptual claims, supposedly derived from poststructuralism. Or rather,
the claim is that the deconstructive logic of diffrance and the constitutive
outside provides a much better theoretical framework for grasping the
specificity of modern democracy than the rationalist consensus
5
6
7
8
9
Mouffe
Mouffe
Mouffe
Mouffe
Mouffe
2005,
2005,
2005,
2005,
2005,
98 f., 105, 135.

16.
11, 105.
15, cf. 21.
22, cf. 99.
216
Herman W. Siemens
model.10 The key critical claim is that the idea of an all-inclusive consensus is a conceptual impossibility.11 It is an error that derives from essentialist thinking. The key positive claim is that pluralism and power in contemporary liberal democracy need to be theorised as antagonistic or agonistic concepts, as a matter of conceptual necessity. As Mouffe puts it:
The notion of the constitutive outside forces us to come to terms
with the idea that pluralism implies the permanence of conflict and antagonism.12 What, then, are the arguments?
To begin with the critical claim concerning the conceptual impossibility of an all-inclusive consensus:13 The idea of an impartial standpoint
(to be) attained through all-inclusive consensus is structurally impossible,
because (following Derrida) difference is both the condition of possibility
for constituting any unity or totality and constitutive of its essential limits
or impossibility.14 This implies first that undecidability is structurally
constitutive of any objectivity, so that there can be no rationally attained
decision; any decision that brings deliberation to a close is therefore necessarily an act of exclusion, whose violence is only masked by branding it
irrational.15 And secondly, it implies that alterity or otherness is irreducible because it is constitutive of any unity, so that all-inclusive consensus
or unanimity is a fiction that masks the necessary exclusions in any decision.16 More importantly, this means that plurality understood as the
alterity or otherness constitutive of any unity cannot be eliminated;
it is irreducible.17
Before interrogating the viability of this derivation, two further remarks are necessary. The first concerns the concept of pluralism as the
excluded remainder that is present in any attempt at reaching consensus
or unanimity. This is a deeply negative notion of pluralism, parasitic on
its attempted negation, and one that falls far short of the positive sense of
pluralism in contemporary democracies that Mouffe wants to describe
and affirm: what she elsewhere characterises as the multiplicity of voices
10 Mouffe 2005, 17, 32. The formulation constitutive outside is from Staten 1984,
16, who presents Derridas thought as focused on the form of form that makes
determinacy in language and thought possible.
11 Mouffe 2005, 33, 137.
12 Mouffe 2005, 32 f.
13 Mouffe 2005, 135.
14 Mouffe 2005, 32.
15 Mouffe 2005, 105.
16 Mouffe 2005, 19.
17 Mouffe 2005, 33.
217
or the proliferation of political spaces and multiplicity of democratic demands.18 In the second place, this concept of pluralism seems to fall short
of her key positive claim that the notion of the constitutive outside forces
us to come to terms with the idea that pluralism implies the permanence of
conflict and antagonism. 19 It is far from clear how pluralism in the above
sense comes to be equated with antagonism as a matter of conceptual necessity.
Turning to the argument itself, the first thing to note is that it is an
argument about the constitution of collective identities, so that pluralism
is conceived as the constitutive outside: i. e. the excluded other that necessarily conditions and disrupts any attempt at consensus, unanimity or
collective identity. Now, of Derridas notion of the constitutive outside,
Mouffe writes that it
has to be incommensurable with the inside, and at the same time, the condition of the emergence of the latter. This is only possible if what is outside
is not simply the outside of a concrete content but something which puts
into question concreteness as such [] a content which, by showing the
radical undecidability of the tension of its constitution, makes its very positivity a function of the symbol of something exceeding it: the possibility/
impossibility of positivity as such [] the them is not the constitutive opposite of a concrete us, but the symbol of what makes any us impossible.20
As a reasonable take on Derridas aporetic account of identity by virtue of

diffrance, this seems to imply the radical indeterminacy of both the inside
and the outside across a boundary that cannot be exclusionary in any tangible sense21 within an unending and doomed process of identity-formation. If so, it falls short of Mouffes exclusionary notion of pluralism, not
to mention her equation of pluralism with antagonism.
To her credit, Mouffe recognises this deficit and goes on to argue that
we need to translate the us/them difference into the Schmittian language
of friend and enemy: From that moment on, it becomes the locus of an
antagonism, that is, it becomes political (in Schmitts sense of the
term).22 Since the deconstructive logic of diffrance will not generate a
determinable sense of pluralism, let alone the antagonism Mouffe equates
with genuine pluralism, she attempts to fuse or superlay it onto Schmitts
political ontology of antagonism between collective identities. The ques18
19
20
21
22
Mouffe 2005, 105, 17.

Mouffe 2005, 33.
Mouffe 2005, 12 f.
See Fritsch 2008, 181 on the infinite porosity of the Derridean boundary.
Mouffe 2005, 13.
218
Herman W. Siemens
tion is whether deconstruction and Schmittian political ontology can be

fused.
According to Schmitt a properly political unity is a collective unity
that can only be formed in the face of an existential threat of annihilation
by another unity. The antagonistic relation of us against them, friends
against enemies is therefore constitutive of the political. This ontology
certainly generates the antagonism Mouffe intends. However, it generates
too much antagonism: Schmittian antagonism the threat of annihilation
as the condition for political unity clearly goes too far for anything resembling democratic contestation or any form of antagonism that can be
contained within a democratic polity. What is more, it has no relation to
the democratic pluralism Mouffe has in mind, since Schmitts political
unities are homogenous, not pluralistic. To deal with these problems,
Mouffe makes two moves with and against Schmitt. The first is to internalise the logic of antagonism between political unities within the democratic community,23 the second is to contrive ways to place limits on
Schmittian antagonism: to reconceptualise the enemy (who can be annihilated, if necessary) into an adversary, that is, the figure of a legitimate
political opponent.
The picture of pluralistic democracy that emerges from Mouffes engagement with and against Schmitt can be characterised as follows:
Schmitts homogenous conception of political unity is displaced by a notion of commonality that is homogenous enough to allow for the formation of a demos, but still allows for pluralism. Democratic pluralism is,
however, limited by shared adherence to two principles that constitute
the polity as democratic: liberty and equality for all. How these are interpreted and applied is a matter of open-ended, agonistic struggle among
the internal groups. Their struggle is, however, limited and contained
this side of annihilation by (1) the minimal consensus on these two principles and a shared symbolic space, as well as by (2) an ethos or disposition
she calls agonistic respect: acknowledging the antagonist as a legitimate
opponent, making it into an adversary, not an enemy. The adversary is a
key category for theorising modern pluralistic democratic politics, and
central to agonistic pluralism; one that allows for vigorous but legitimate
opposition.24
The most obvious problem with Mouffes account concerns her reliance on Schmitts logic of antagonism: if the threat of annihilation is the
23 Rummens 2009, 3.
24 Mouffe 2005, 14, 102.
219
condition for the possibility of the formation of a collective identity (a

we), then limiting the threat of annihilation into agonistic contestation
la Mouffe is too weak to generate a we.25 What I would like to emphasise, however, are the problems that come from Mouffes attempt to fuse
the claims of deconstruction with her quasi-Schmittian political ontology.
In the first place, the minimal consensus on freedom and equality required to limit Schmitts antagonism/enemy into agonism/adversary requires a shared symbolic space, as we have seen. Yet in the passage quoted earlier26 Mouffe herself correctly identifies Derridas constitutive outside as incommensurable with the inside. This would make it impossible
for citizens to share values with their adversaries, let alone engage in agonistic struggle over their application and interpretation. In the second
place, Schmitts political ontology involves a logic of determination
with clear boundaries and necessary exclusions of identifiable others.
This logic of determination is moreover required for Mouffe to formulate
her exclusionary concept of pluralism, if it is to have a determinable sense
at all. Yet this is utterly irreconcilable with the deconstructive account of
identity, which, as Fritsch has shown, works as an interminable logic of
indeterminacy: Identity must [] be understood as the perpetual attempt to cast to the outside that which, however, is always needed on
the inside. The attempt thus necessarily fails.27 Schmitts political ontology is, moreover, a prime instance of essentialism, radically opposed by
the anti-essentialism of deconstruction, and this touches on a fourth
problem: even if Schmitts friend-enemy antagonism is limited and internalised within the demos by Mouffe, her reliance on Schmittian logic
does require there to be homogenous units or essences at some level.
Against Schmitts recourse to the pre-political category of the people
(Volk) as the substantive unit on which political unity is built, Mouffe
proposes to rethink the unity of the people as the result of a political construction rather than a presupposition.28 Yet she concedes that there is
the need of some form of homogeneity in a democracy,29 as she
must if she is going to rely on Schmitts political ontology in any
25 See Fritsch 2008, 177, note 3. For critical accounts of Mouffe, I am greatly indebted to Fritsch 2008 and Rummens 2009.
26 Mouffe 2005, 12 f.
27 Fritsch 2008, 183. See also 181: For Derrida identity is marked not so much by
excluding defined others, but by the infinite porosity of a supposed inside and
outside, and hence its constant re-negotiation.
28 Mouffe 2005, 55.
29 Mouffe 2005, 55.
220
Herman W. Siemens
sense. The question is whether this residual homogeneity, as an irreducible ontological moment, can do justice to contemporary forms of pluralism, in which collective, political identities are often fugitive and shortlived and command an individuals allegiance as but one among many,
often conflicting identities. If so, then Mouffe can either adhere to a
quasi-Schmittian political ontology, with its irreducible moment of homogeneity, or strive to do justice to contemporary forms of pluralism,
since she cannot do both.
3. Mouffes agonism: Deconstruction or reconstruction?

Mouffes political agonism, I have argued, is not a defensible application
of deconstruction to democratic theory. Instead, I suggest that it is better
understood as reconstructive reaction to deconstruction that takes up
(misapprehensions of ) deconstructivist insights and tries to merge them
with her commitments to Schmitts political ontology adapted to democratic values. For the reasons outlined above, I believe that this deconstructive adaptation of Schmitts thought to democracy fails. But this
does not mean that Mouffes project is without value or promise.
Her project is important, first and foremost, because it identifies
clearly the central task for political philosophy today: to rethink pluralism
in a way that addresses its contemporary forms and formations in a rapidly changing world. This goes for political agonism in general, but
Mouffes version is distinctive in a number of ways. From Schmitt
comes her insistence that we need an ontology to think through democratic pluralism in the present. From Derrida, comes the demand that this
ontology must be sensitive to the deconstruction of essentialism. And underpinning the whole project is the claim that genuine pluralism involves
tension and antagonism.
The question is whether we can hold onto this valuable insight: there
can be no genuine pluralism without antagonism between identities or
identifiable unities, without either falling on one side into the deconstructive logic of interminable indeterminacy no identities, no determinate
boundaries or exclusions; or, on the other side into the Schmittian logic of
determinacy and extreme antagonism (the threat of annihilation) among
pre-given essences or unities. In my closing remarks I want to suggest that
we can do no better than to draw on Nietzsches thought for ways in
which to develop a viable reconstruction of democratic pluralism today
that avoids these traps.
221
In his later thought, Nietzsche develops a dynamic, pluralistic ontology of conflict under the rubric of Will to Power that addresses the insights and problems described above.
In the first place, will to power designates an anti-essentialist, relational interpretation of reality in which pluralism is intrinsically antagonistic. He writes of the relational character of all occurrence30 consisting
of relations of tension, attraction/repulsion, action/resistance among
forces without substance.31
Secondly, within this ontology, there is place for a processual account
of identity-formation (like Derrida); only it is one that arrives at determinate unities (unlike Derrida). The will to power designates a processual
ontology of occurrence (Geschehen) or Becoming (Werden), and for
Nietzsche the character of Becoming is to be an incessant Fest-setzen,
a multiple fixing (Feststellen) or positing (Setzen) of Being: All occurrence, all movement, all Becoming as a fixing of relations of degree
and power, as a struggle32 Nietzsches ontology thus describes processes
of identity-formation that are determinate or successful, if only provisionally. This holds more promise of capturing contemporary political
formations than Derridas aporetic logic of identity-formation that necessarily fails, where the other always remains indeterminate across a boundary too porous to exclude or even demarcate an outside from an inside.33 On the other hand, Nietzsche does, like Derrida, have a nuanced
30 Relations-charakter alles Geschehens, KSA 11.157, 26[36]. References to

Nietzsches works follow the standard German abbreviations, as used in the Smtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbnden (= KSA), with section/
aphorism numbers and/or names, as appropriate; where necessary, page references are given (e. g. KSA 3.42 = KSA, vol. 3, p. 42). References to the Nachlass,
also from the KSA, follow the notation therein (e. g. KSA 7.23, 2[13] = KSA
vol. 7, p. 23, note 2[13]).
31 The will to power is best understood as an attempt to develop a dynamic, relational concept of power, or rather powers; that is, (1) power as activity, the activity
of increasing power, which can only be an overpowering, because (2) power-as-activity can only act in relation to the resistance offered by other counter-powers.
On Nietzsches dynamic, relational concept of force (Kraft) and its sources, see
Abel 1984, 6 27; Mittasch 1952, 102 113.
32 Alles Geschehen, alle Bewegung, alles Werden als ein Feststellen von Grad- und
Kraftverhltnissen, als ein Kampf KSA 12.385, 9[91]. See also: KSA 11.449,
34[88][89]; KSA 11.244, 26[359]; KSA 11.623, 39[13]; KSA 12.135 f., 2[139];
KSA 1.360, SE 3; KSA 3.622, FW 370; KSA 6.245, AC 58.
33 Fritsch 2008, 181, 183.
222
Herman W. Siemens
understanding of ambiguities of friendship, of the friend in the enemy

and the enemy in the friend that completely escapes Schmitts logic.
Finally, Nietzsches ontology of conflict involves a theory of power
that opens the prospect of alternatives to Schmitt, alternatives that resolve
some of the underlying problems with his account of political identity. A
key problem concerns Schmitts Hobbesian concept of power. If for
Schmitt the existential threat of annihilation is the condition for political
identity, it is because he works with Hobbess conception of power, which
is oriented towards self-preservation in the face of an external threat.
Hobbesian power is exercised from a position of weakness or lack (of security, of a future good) in relation or reaction to something external. It is
what Nietzsche calls a reactive concept of power, in contrast with his
own active conception of power, defined with reference to process (expending energy) or activity (extending power), rather than goals (selfpreservation).34 Nietzschean power is an endogenous source of change,
a conception that goes back to Leibnizs dynamic concept of force, so
that movement or change is understood, not in mechanistic terms as
the (reactive) effect of an exogenous cause or force, but in Leibnizian
terms, as the result of a living force, that is, an endogenous source of activity.35
This active conception of power has two further characteristics alien
to Schmittian-Hobbesian power, which are essential for an antagonistic
ontology of pluralism that is to offer more than the alternatives of annihilation or security. Since active power is not bound to a static telos of selfpreservation, there are no pre-determined constraints on the forms that
this activity can take. On the one hand, the exercise of power does not
need to be limited to the hostile resisting or overpowering of other powers
or power-complexes, but can take an indeterminate number of qualitatively diverse forms. On the other hand, it can also take self-destructive
forms of activity and as such, opens the space for the qualitative transformation of existing power-complexes, forms of life or political identities
into new forms, what Nietzsche calls self-overcoming (Selbstberwindung). Nietzsches Genealogy of Morals is replete with examples of both
the qualitative transformation of life-forms and the diverse forms that
the exercise of power can take.36 This touches on the second characteristic
34 See Patton 2001, 153.
35 Abel 1984, 16 f.
36 See Patton 2001; Saar 2008. Saar shows how the three essays of the Genealogy
exhibit three distinct kinds of power.
223
of Nietzsches active concept of power. Because Schmittian power is

bound to the telos of self-preservation, any opposing power can only signify an existential threat. Nietzsches active concept of power, by contrast,
allows for reinterpretations of the opposition or resistance offered by an
external power. Opposition or resistance does not need to be just a threat
or an inhibitor to ones power; under certain conditions, it can act as a
stimulant (Reiz) that provokes or empowers each power-complex to
new, creative deeds or works, indeed: to overcome ones opponent
through creative self-transformation or self-overcoming. It is this reinterpretation of opposing forces from inhibitors into stimulants that lies at
the heart of Nietzsches description of the Greek agon as a dynamic of reciprocal provocation and reciprocal limitation.37 For Nietzsche it is clear
that the transformation of destructive antagonism into creative agonism
can only occur under conditions of approximate equality among a plurality of powers or power-complexes. What is not clear, if we move from the
Greek polis to contemporary politics, are the kinds of political institutions
that would make for such an equality of power among the diverse and
shifting identities that characterise contemporary democracies. This, it
seems to me, is the challenge posed by Nietzsches thought for the reconstruction of a viable ontology of democratic pluralism today.
37 In Homers Contest Nietzsche writes that the agonal play of forces (Wettspiel der
Krfte) presupposes that in a natural order of things, there are always several geniuses who stimulate each other reciprocally to deeds, as they also hold each other
reciprocally within the limits of measure (da, in einer natrlichen Ordnung der
Dinge, es immer mehrere Genies giebt, die sich gegenseitig zur That reizen, wie
sie sich auch gegenseitig in der Grenze des Maaes halten). Homers Wettkampf,
KSA 1.789.
Just Tell Me Who You Are! :

Do We Need Identity in Philosophy and
the Social Sciences?1
Flavia Monceri
1. Identity as a problem
For almost a decade now I have been working on the notion of identity,
trying to deconstruct it by showing that it is unuseful, and sometimes
even harmful, for addressing the core issues of my discipline political
philosophy. In a number of articles and books I considered individual
identity,2 the link between identity and diversity,3 and the relationship between identity and identification.4 Altogether, my work on identity explicitly aims at replacing it with a more suitable notion to address the
problem of constructing models of political order in contemporary complex and multicultural societies, taking into due account the fact that diversity matters. Hence, in some of my recent books I tried to apply my
theoretical findings to the issues of interculturality,5 multiculturalism
and complexity,6 and sex and gender diversity.7 In the following, I try
to argue for my negative answer to the question concerning the need
for identity in philosophy and the social sciences by offering, in the
first section, a criticism of the notion, while in the second section I suggest replacing it with the word identification, which I find more adequate for rendering the meaning we usually, but deceptively, attach to
identity.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Note to the reader: This paper employs gender-neutral pronouns. These are sie
(he, she), hir (him, her), and hirself (himself, herself ).
See Monceri 2003; Monceri 2007, chap. 4, 5; Monceri 2009.
See Monceri 2006a; Monceri 2006b.
See Monceri 2006c.
See Monceri 2006d.
See Monceri 2008.
See Monceri 2010.
226
Flavia Monceri
However, replacing identity with identification does not imply a reconstruction of identity itself via a linguistic intervention. Rather, I mean
to take seriously the deconstruction of identity by showing that just such
a reconstruction is impossible as well as unuseful, because it would unavoidably come up again and again against the difficulties of defining
identity in an essentialist way. In this sense, replacing identity with
identification seems to me to be the best way, at least for the time
being, to remain aware of the dynamic and constructed character of
what we are still accustomed to mean when we use the term identity.
In other words, if some form of reconstruction is thinkable in the
wake of the deconstruction of identity, it can only exist by acknowledging
that the traditional notion of identity is no longer adequate for contemporary philosophy and social sciences to address its theoretical challenges.
Therefore, it must be replaced by a different notion, linguistically formulated by a different word and able to convey a different meaning.
Although space constraints do not allow me to discuss the matter
more deeply, I would like to add that the ultimate goal of my de-construction and re-construction of identity is to elaborate upon a more adequate notion to cope with all those instances in which references run the
risk of endangering the life of particular concrete individuals who are labelled by means of it: among them, disabled, differently sexed/gendered
and culturally diverse people. As a matter of fact, to continue deploying
the notion of identity has a relevant impact at the level of the everyday
life of marginalised individuals, because the possibility for them to be
recognised by the normals depends on the acceptance for their part
to be inserted into categories which are either imposed upon them, or
chosen by them within the catalogue of identities available at the social
and cultural level. Either way, an asymmetrical power relationship is at
play, which could at least be exposed by shifting to the notion of identification.8
My basic assumption is that diversity is more original than identity,
because it is the characteristic feature of environmental complexity,
whereas identity is the outcome of an operation through which that
same complexity is reduced.9 In this sense, trying to define diversity is
8
9
On these matters, and especially on the relationship between abnormality and

power, see notably Foucault 1998, 2003.
The following argumentation refers to the epistemological paradigm known as
radical constructivism (on which see at least the classical works by Foerster
1984, Maturana/Varela 1992, Glasersfeld 1996, Watzlawick 1984, Poerksen
Just Tell Me Who You Are!
227
a sort of paradox, because in order to rationally elaborate upon it a definition complexity must be simplified by leaving aside what is different in
favour of what is similar. At the same time, human cognitive structures
cannot refrain from reducing complexity, and hence from defining, because they cannot compute complexity as it is.10 Therefore, although I
will give two definitions of diversity, the one emerging from the individual and the other from the intersubjective perspective, I am well aware
that such definitions are only tentative, provisional, and inescapably partial.
From the individual perspective, diversity dwells in a (more or less
pronounced) gap between the stimuli and data an individual perceives
in the surrounding environment and the mental frameworks at hir disposal to select, catalogue, and recombine all of it as information that is
meaningful to hir. In other words, perceiving diversity overlaps with existing mental frameworks which are unable to automatically incorporate
the new stimuli and data. These frameworks seem to be at least partially
at odds with the available information, that is to say the descriptions of the
world, in the given spacetime in which the individual is situated. In the
face of this gap, the individual has at least two possible options: on the
one hand, sie can interpret the new stimuli and data as exceptions, trying
to explain them by means of the already available mental frameworks. On
2004), as well as to Nietzschean perspectivism (on which see Hales/Welshon
2000; Reginster 2000).
10 According to Biggiero 2001, human systems are characterised by the presence of
all sources of complexity, and therefore are the most complex systems we face
with. This perspective shads an anthropomorphic light on the entire issue of
complexity, which we address as observed irreducible complexity (OIC) (4 5).
As Biggiero states, many problems are difficult, and therefore are few predictable. In this sense, complexity is a question of degree, and specifically the degree of
our ignorance. An object is more or less complex depending on the ignorance
(quantity of information) we have about it, and depending on our ability to
make distinctions, that is, to perceive differences and therefore get information
(5). However, current debate in natural sciences and epistemology is (more or
less explicitly) claiming that there is a qualitative difference in meaning between
complexity and difficulty, with complexity referring to objects which are predictable only in the short run and that can be faced only with heuristic and
not optimizing strategies (5 6). Consequently it can be stated that when difficulty is close to infinity, it becomes complexity: the explanation of such transformation lies in the criteria established to create a threshold in the continuum between zero difficulty (certainty, perfect order, perfect predictability) and complexity (6). It is my contention that in human systems the possibility of a zero
difficulty is never given.
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Flavia Monceri
the other hand, sie can modify the mental frameworks to allow for the
perceived diversity that is to say novelty.11
Beyond that, from the viewpoint of the single individual all other
human and non-human individuals are part of the environment, and
therefore different from me. But the most interesting diversity is the
one which emerges when that individual interacts with other human individuals, because sie presumably recognises them as similar to hir at least
to the extent to which a more or less diffuse definition exists of the notion
of human being. This kind of diversity has to do with the comparison
between the amounts of information at the disposal of each individual
directly involved in the interaction. What is relevant here is the fact
that each individual finally perceives a gap between hir personal interpretations of environmental stimuli and data, and the ones elaborated by all
other individuals. This comes about because all human individuals construct their own reality by means of applying similar cognitive structures
but they construct them differently from each other. As a result, despite
the very same stimuli and data and the very same spacetime constraints,
personal life experiences cannot overlap with one another.
This leads to a different organisation of the mental schemata elaborated to interpret environmental stimuli and data, that is to say a visual
angle or perspective peculiar to each individual, from which those stimuli
and data are unceasingly re-elaborated and inserted within a unitary
framework.12 Therefore, as soon as two human individuals interact,
they experience also a gap between their mutual worldviews, which can
have more relevant effects than in the case of an interaction with other
species. This is because the circumstance that they mutually recognise
as similar at least to a certain extent, urges them to interact on the
basis of the expectation that ones own perspective will be extensible
also to the other. In another piece of work, I define this circumstance
11 On the relationship between complexity and novelty, see Taylor 2001 and Monceri 2005; on diversity as background noise leading to innovation, see Atlan
1986; on new information as a difference that makes a difference, see Bateson
1979.
12 I hold here to the notion of perspective as elaborated by Friedrich Nietzsche. See
Nietzsche 1968, [481], where he writes: Against positivism, which halts at phenomena There are only facts I would say: No, facts is precisely what there
is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact in itself : perhaps it is a
folly to want to do such a thing [] In so far as the word knowledge has any
meaning, the world is knowable; but it is interpretable otherwise, it has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings. Perspectivism.
229
as a self-centric impulse, meaning that each of us tends to maintain that the

world should conform to the picture we individually construct of it, as
well as to act as if all other human individuals build just the same picture.13 This is also one of the most relevant reasons why interactions
among individuals tends to be conflictual, because it is on the stage of
concrete interactions, so to speak, that the deep gap comes to the fore
among the differences expressed, performed, and exhibited by any single
individual. It is only in coping with the potential conflicts that the selfcentric impulse may lead to a model of cultural, social and especially political order that is necessary to establish a peaceful point of equilibrium
with as much stability as possible. One of the tools to this end is constituted through the elaboration of identity as a social institution.
I mean to say that identity is the emergent outcome of any reiterated
exchange of environmental descriptions between people, taking the form
of intersubjective models of order in which an implict or explicit agreement has been reached. Thus these models work to the extent that those
descriptions continue to be reiterated in the concrete interactions between
a sufficient number of individuals. This implies that identity can be assigned meaning only at the intersubjective level. As a matter of fact, as
single individuals we do not need any reference to the notion of identity,
because we do not need to rationally conceive of our self-intuition or selfperception as a self , except if an interaction with other things or people
does occur that urges me to ask myself who am I?. In other words, the
fact that I have an identity is self-evident to me, and is unaffected by
experiencing my own differences. In the real time of my everyday life I
have no need to think about this by means of applying my cognitive
structures: I know who I am by immediate intuition, and the question
of my identity instead arises just as soon as I begin to think about it due
to external provocations.14
In my everyday life it is only necessary that I recognise myself as myself at any given moment, without any need to rationally define that
same myself . The stability of my being the way I am in the real time
of my concrete experiences is independent of a conscious elaboration
of myself as this individual who is constituted by these n-features
which are only my own. I am simply depending on my ability to preserve
13 See Monceri 2006d, chap. 5.
14 This is the reason why I do not agree with the vast majority of theoretical accounts of individual or personal identity, not even when they try to offer
some new perspectives, as it is the case for instance with Copp 2002.
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Flavia Monceri
the intuition of being identical with myself in spite of all the differences I
am destined to undergo in my life-course, which are in themselves constitutive of myself. This intuition cannot be rationally defined (it cannot
be assigned any name) as a set of characteristics already culturally and socially that is to say intersubjectively defined, thus losing the uniqueness toward which those characteristics should point.
The need to reflect rationally on my identity arises only when an interaction occurs, because I find myself confronted with others of whom
I perceive as non-coincidental to me. Of course, you might object that if
this need does occur as soon as I interact, then it is always there, since
interaction is just the original modality through which human beings experience their world, being therefore unavoidable. Hence, you might conclude that if things are so, it is not true that I can manage without identity as a single individual, because I do properly exist only by interacting.
Indeed, it is just like that: we cannot manage without identity, but only if
it is defined as identification. Since the core feature of an interaction consists in the above-mentioned intuition of the non-coincidental instance
between me and the others that is to say in the intuition of diversity
as soon as I interact I need to construct an identity by means of identifying myself through a selection of those features of me which are relevant to that specific interaction.
As a matter of fact, the source of identity is diversity and not the
reverse because it consists in a model of the self emerging from the
intuition of our being different from one another. Identity overlaps
with the elaboration of a fixed, static and stable self , to which however
no reality does correspond, as it is the outcome of a complex process of
(re)construction at several levels. Firstly, there is the construction operated
by the single individual in order to introduce hirself in a specific form,
and not another. Secondly, there is the construction carried out by the
other(s), which is not necessarily coincidental to self-presentation. Lastly,
there is the dynamics between the different (re)presentations of the constructed and read selves, implying a negotiation from which radically
different models may emerge from the ones originally staged. What
should be stressed here is the fact that in all of these processes what
ends up being irrelevant is the individual identity understood as a property of the related individual which should insure that sie be perceived by
the others as a unique entity.
As a consequence, identity is not something we have or are: it is rather
something we construct for the purpose of any single concrete interaction
to overcome the difficulties posed by diversity by means of referring to
231
something (presumably) common which makes the self intelligible to

the other. It is in this sense that identity is always the outcome of a dynamic process involving both the self and the other(s) through which
the most adequate features are identified to represent ourselves in a
given situation. Here we find the first reason not to hold onto the notion
of identity: it gives rise to the delusion of a correspondence between the
available models of the individual and the concrete individuals. Such
models are merely the outcome of a selection among non-exhaustive features, that is to say the outcome of self-identifications and identifications
operating through others: what any one of us does when interacting is to
identify by showing and representing what is (presumably) general and
sharable, and not what is specific and unique.
2. From identity to identification

By now, it should be clear why I state that identity is a social institution.
The origins of any social, that is to say intersubjective, institution may be
individuated in the need for individuals to elaborate criteria or rules in
order to survive in their environment, trying to avoid intersubjective conflicts arising from the perception of diversity. Seen from this perspective,
identity is in accordance to the construction of a certain number of models of the self that are widespread and shared enough to prove effectively
that there is automatic placement of oneself and others within the general
framework at the interactants disposal. This requires the identification of
the correct elements to insert into an identity model and its subsequent
assignment to serve individuals with as low as possible margin for error.
From the individual standpoint, this implies the need as well as the ability
to self-identify, that is to say to recognise hirself in one of the available
identity models to aim at minimising the potential for conflict in the interaction. In short, the higher the ability and possibility for an individual
to self-identify and be identified with one of these models, the lower the
risk of the interaction failing due to a lack of recognition.
Identity as a social institution consists in a set of models intersubjectively elaborated in a conventional way, according to the cognitive modalities I have already sketched. They consist in a process of gradual selection
and negotiation of typical features, contributing to shape a particular type
of human being who embodies a specific identity. Moreover, also in
this case the issue arises of the correspondence between that ideal type
of human being and its concrete manifestations. Put another way, it is
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Flavia Monceri
assumed that the concrete individual should fit into the model, which is
no longer understood as a construction, but as something real. In effect
the outcome of the process through which an identity is constructed is
not a description of an individuals identity as it is, but rather an attempt
to normalise the concrete individual by means of measuring hir individuality against the norm established by the model.
In other words, the usual definition of identity seems self-contradictory, because it stresses that the (self-)assigned identity of a particular individual corresponds to what sie is, that is to say that it represents hir essential reality. However, since identity is the outcome of a selection of
characteristics, it is highly probable that in constructing it just those characteristics will be discarded which would stress individual differences, because those elements could more easily allow intersubjective conflicts to
emerge. However, the assertion remains that the identity of a single individual allows for identifying hir and only hir, if the Western binary logic
is to work properly, according to which two distinct things cannot be
identical at the same time. This clashes with the opposite claim that identity as a social institution should be able to minimise the incidence of diversity by understanding that the individual is a member of a class, rather
than a self-standing element. In my opinion, the only way out of this impasse is to replace the notion of identity with that of identification.
There are two main reasons why we should replace the term identity
with identification. On the one hand, because identification logically as
well as concretely comes before identity, being the process from which
identity results as a product. On the other hand, because of the mistakes
and dangers arising at the level of everyday life from the idea that individual identity would be something given and sufficient to describe the
essence of a concrete individual. More particularly, although identity
is a necessary tool to categorise and stereotype each single individual in
order to interact, the lack of awareness about the previous process of identification leads to the collateral effect of variously denying the constitutive
role also of those features cast off the concrete individual identity. From a
political viewpoint, this implies refusing individual differences that cannot be subsumed under the accepted identity models, therefore marginalising those individuals who do not want or cannot properly self-identify
or be identified.
Of course, it is true that for any individual having or being an identity
by means of which sie can identify or give personal details upon request,
is a necessary condition to enter any group, as well as being legitimated
by asking for recognition on the part of the dominant group(s). This po-
233
litical side of the relationship between identity and identification becomes plain in the attitude of the normals toward different people.
By individuating a number of identities, this approach can cause either
inclusion (accepted) or exclusion and discrimination (rejected). This is
why investigating identity means ultimately investigating social identity
as an identification practice emerging from the request to self-place in
a static and univocal way, as well as the acceptance of a particular configuration of the self able to match the elements diffusely recognised as typical or normal for a given identity model.15 Therefore, even in this case
identity overlaps with the indefinite number of identification processes to
which each individual must resolve to interact with others who interrogate hir in order to decode or read hir in a unambiguous way.
The construction of social identity must assume that single individuals try to harmonise their mutual worldviews, which have a perspectival
character, and particularly that they assume the existence of a shared
order of reality within which they collocate similarities and differences.
As it is well known, the process through which such shared reality is constructed at the social level is the subject of Peter Berger and Thomas
Luckmanns seminal work The social construction of reality (1966).16
They show how everyday life manifests as an already ordered reality,
which appears already objectified, that is, constituted by an order of objects that have been designated as objects before my appearance on the
scene,17 and is organized around the here of my body and the
now of my present.18 Besides the world of things, the reality of everyday life further presents itself to me as an intersubjective world, a world
that I share with others: indeed, I cannot exist in everyday life without
continually interacting and communicating with others, though I know
that the others have a perspective on this common world that is not identical with mine, because my here is their there. My now does not
fully overlap with theirs.19
The social order of reality emerges through the interactions of individuals, but originates from the possibility to typify such interactions,
15 The literature on social identity is very remarkable. I limit myself to mention a
few contributions, which also tackle some of the issues relevant to the present
article: Cerulo 1997; Huddy 2001; Wong 2002; Jenkins 2003; Reicher 2004.
16 Berger/Luckmann 1991.
17 Berger/Luckmann 1991, 35.
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Flavia Monceri
that is to make them foreseeable and reiterable.20 In fact, all human activity is subject to habitualization, because any action that is repeated frequently becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be reproduced with
an economy of effort.21 Social institutions, and among them also identity
(although the authors would probably not agree with this extension),
originate just from a reciprocal typification of habitualized actions by
types of actors.22 We might conclude that their origin should be traced
back to an inherent character of human cognitive structure that urges
us to reduce environmental complexity by means of referring to the reiteration of mutual actions. Anyway, the fact seems undeniable that a trend
toward the construction of orders is surely there, and allows us neither to
directly make conclusions about the type of order which emerges from
individual interactions and their institutionalisation, nor to claim that
an order, once emerged, will be stable, certain and durable.
The process through which a number of social identities are constructed is very useful because it allows us to deploy the notion of identity
as a category of practice, that is to say as one of those categories of everyday social experience, developed and deployed by ordinary social actors, as distinguished from the experience-distant categories used by social
analysts.23 In this sense, if it can be granted that everyday identity talk
and identity politics are real and important phenomena, at the same
time it should not be forgotten that the contemporary salience of identity as a category of practice does not require its use as a category of analysis.24 As a matter of fact, some categories such as nation, race and
identity are used analytically a good deal of the time more or less as
they are used in practice, in an implicitly or explicitly reifying manner,
that is to say in a manner that implies or asserts that nations, races,
and identities, exist and that people have a nationality, a race,
an identity.25 In short, the confusion between identity as a category
of practice and a category of analysis continues to reproduce an essentialist argumentation, in spite of all the contemporary attempts to overcome it.
20
21
22
23
24
25
On this aspect, see Goffman 1959.

Berger/Luckmann 1991, 70 71.
Berger/Luckmann 1991, 73.
Brubaker/Cooper 2000, 4.
235
It is well known that especially moving from social constructionist approaches, a weaker understanding of identity has been elaborated, according to which identity should be thought of as an ongoing process making
it much more fluid and dynamic than before. Anyway, the existence of
identity is never denied, and it is rather strongly reaffirmed although
on the basis of a different path of reasoning that no longer stresses its correspondence with an independent reality but with discursive practices of
narration and narratives that work as justifications for the reality of the
constructed individual and social identities.26 In other words, what is singular in this shift to a weaker notion of identity is just the maintenance of
this very notion: as Brubaker and Cooper rightly put it, it is not clear
why what is routinely characterised as multiple, fragmented, and fluid
should be conceptualized as identity at all,27 given that the everyday
sense of identity strongly suggests at least some self-sameness over
time, some persistence, something that remains identical, the same,
while other things are changing.28
As a result of their in-depth exploration, Brubaker and Cooper suggest replacing the notion of identity with two further notions: identification and self-understanding. Identification seems to be a suitable candidate because as a processual, active term, derived from a verb, identification lacks the reifying connotations of identity, by suggesting that
we specify the agents that do the identifying and not assuming that such
identifying [] will necessarily result in the internal sameness, the distinctiveness, the bounded groupness that political enterpreneurs may
seek to achieve.29 As I already stated above, identification allows us to
maintain the awareness that identity results from a dynamic process
which always entails some reference to the power asymmetries at work
in any operation through which individuals are subsumed under one or
more identity models by means of stereotyping or otherwise categorising
them. On the contrary, the reference to identity entails a sort of displacement, by suggesting that identity models are more than this, that is to say
that they are able to encompass also that part of individual identity that is
26 For an interesting account of such position, applied to multiculturalist theory, see

Benhabib 2002. For an introduction to social constructivism, see Burr 2003;
Gergen 2005.
27 Brubaker/Cooper 2000, 6.
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Flavia Monceri
by definition irreducible to any rationalisation and/or narration having

to do with individual uniqueness.
In its turn, self-understanding is a dispositional term that designates
what might be called situated subjectivity: ones sense of who one is, of
ones social location, and of how (given the first two) one is prepared to
act.30 Self-understanding lacks the reifying connotation of identity, it
is not restricted to situations of flux and instability, because self-understandings may be variable across time and across persons, but they may be
stable, and different from identity it has no privileged semantic connection with sameness or difference. Moreover, self-understanding seems a
more suitable term than the related self-identification and self-representation, because self-understandings may be tacit; even when they are
formed, as they ordinarily are, in and through prevailing discourses,
they may exist, and inform action, without themselves being discursively
articulated; both self-identification and self-representation, on the contrary, suggest at least some degree of explicit discursive articulation.31
Now, as I see it, the term self-understanding is intended in the same
sense as the individual unspeakable identity to which I referred above,
and this is also the main reason why I prefer to hold only the term identification as a possible substitute for identity. Although I agree with the
authors that self-understanding could be a good term to stress the usually
forgotten individual side of the discourse about identity, the difficulty remains in my opinion to impose a name to that individual side. If individual identity is to be located in the realm of what is implicit and
tacit, the possibility evidently is lost of finding a proper name to define
it. In fact, as soon as individual identity is labelled, however only through
means of an operational term such as self-understanding, it enters the
realm of intersubjectivity, that which is relational and social, and therefore also linguistically reconstructable through a discursive narration.
But in so doing, the very uniqueness that the term self-understanding
has been chosen to preserve would be lost.
Put bluntly, the distinction between self-understanding and self-identification is very subtle, as also Brubaker and Cooper state and it could
therefore shift again to the two overlapping meanings of identity that
caused the original confusion.32 Of course, it cannot be denied that indi30 Brubaker/Cooper 2000, 17.
31 All quotations in Brubaker/Cooper 2000, 18.
32 This seems to me to be the case also with a recent and very interesting work by
David Lyon, devoted to the issue of contemporary ways of identifying citizens
237
vidual identity in the sense of self-understanding has a relational character due to the fact that any individual elaborates upon it on the basis of
hir experiences that occur in the same intersubjective environment in
which identification processes are unceasingly at work. However, what
should be ensured is the awareness that there is an unbridgeable difference between the proper individual side of identity, which is not communicable, and the intersubjective side of it that is always co-constructed in
and through interaction.
From this perspective it seems to me that using the terms identification and self-identification is the most appropriate way of preserving the
awareness of the impossibility of capturing the individual unique side of
identity. Moreover, the awareness that all models of identity are simply
products of multiple and interconnected identification processes, also
might be more useful for sustaining the intuition of diversity. This
could more easily lead to the modification of models of identity at a societys disposal in order to take into account the individuals who cannot
fit into those models, therefore being excluded from full citizenship as a
result of lacking recognition or failing to belong. From another point
of view, the awareness that our unique identity as single concrete individuals escapes any attempt at definition, might even favour a gradual
growth of individual political action as a legitimate expression of identity
politics,33 which could be added to more traditional ways of conceiving
political activism.
by means of various technological tools and systems, in which the usual understanding of identity seems to be still at work, carrying with it the contradictions
considered in the present article. See Lyon 2009, esp. 8 15.
33 In my opinion, this is the most correct meaning of the slogan The individual is
the political, on which I am currently working, also with reference to post-anarchist debates, in order to elaborate a model of political order able to more clearly
accept the relevance of individuals attitudes, gestures, ways of life, etc., for, and
their impact on, political systems.
Daydreaming:
Derridas Contribution to the Theory of Law
Alberto Andronico
Its kind of fun to do the impossible.
(Walt Disney)
1. Little and poorly

Little and poorly: this is how jurists have read Derrida up to this point.
At least this has been the case for us in Italy, with several notable exceptions.1 Unfortunately, the situation seems to be similar across the Atlantic.
In fact, American jurisprudence has demonstrated a strong interest in deconstruction in comparison with the lack of attention given to it by their
European counterparts. However, in the end we might question whether
American jurists have been more careful readers of deconstruction. Moreover, it is difficult to escape from the suspicion that in Derridean texts
that focus more on juridical and political matters, there is a remainder
that jurists have been wary of addressing. It may just be that this remainder will prove more interesting than the up until now standardised reading of Derridas works.
Three questions follow from these initial observations. First, why has
juridical theory paid so little attention to Derrida? (Perhaps this neglect is
due to reasons internal to the discipline, although it is hard to tell.) Second, why has it read Derrida so poorly? Lastly (and perhaps most centrally), why should the jurist go back to the school of deconstruction? What
can jurisprudence learn from Derrida? This last question frames the first
two, signaling an initial movement outside traditional juridical frameworks.2
1
Obviously this is not a matter of handing out demerits. In this spirit, it is worth
signalling one of these exceptions in Italian scholarship which speaks to the field
of philosophy of law rather than legal theory narrowly construed: see Romano
2007. See also Goodrich/Hofmann/Rosenfeld 2008 and Legrand 2009.
Andronico 2010.
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Alberto Andronico
2. Heterogeneity without opposition

Why, then, should the jurist read Derrida? This seemingly simple, almost
nave question provokes a deceptively facile answer: the jurist should read
Derrida because it is difficult to find in the world of contemporary philosophy an author who illustrates with so much lucidity what law is in
terms of its origins and its (dys)functional structure. But above all, Derrida addresses why there should be law. Certainly not because it is necessary, as the old claims of political realism would have it by interpreting
law as a necessary evil, following a line of thought running from Augustine, to Luther, Hobbes, passing through Kant arriving at Carl Schmitt,
and so on. No, Derrida locates something much more interesting, which
in a single line, we can characterise as the idea that without law justice
would not be possible (and vice versa).
Derrida develops this idea with clarity in a paper he delivered in 1989
at the conference Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, organised by Drucilla Cornell in conjunction with the Cardozo School of
Law. In his talk, Derrida plays with the deconstructibility of law and
the undeconstructibility of justice (and with deconstruction as justice),
focusing on the cleft that separates and on the contamination that traverses these domains:
The structure I am describing here is a structure in which law [droit] is essentially deconstructible, whether because it is founded, constructed on interpretable and transformable textual strata (and that is the history of law
[droit], its possible and necessary transformation, sometimes its amelioration), or because its ultimate foundation is by definition unfounded. The
fact that law is deconstructible is not bad news. We may even see in this a
stroke of luck for politics, for all historical progress. But the paradox that
Id like to submit for discussion is the following: it is this deconstructible
structure of law [droit], or if you prefer of justice as droit, that also insures
the possibility of deconstruction. Justice in itself, if such a thing exists, outside or beyond law, is not deconstructible. No more than deconstruction itself, if such a thing exists. Deconstruction is justice.3
The structure of law, its own deconstructibility, Derrida affirms, constitutes the condition for the possibility of justice, and therefore of deconstruction itself. This is an important passage, upon which rests the possibility of rehabilitation, although cautious, of parliamentarian and representative democracy (the same democracy that seemed to be unavailing at
that moment) that Derrida, oriented toward those same concerns made
3
Derrida 1992a, 14 15.
Daydreaming: Derridas Contribution to the Theory of Law
241
by Walter Benjamin, defends against the critics.4 The central argument of

these critics resides in the impossibility of fully realising justice in some
pure form. In its pretense to purity, this critique looks to a divine violence
that would destroy the law, as opposed to a mythic violence that would establish and maintain the law. However, as Derrida argues, justice is not
the law, but neither is it opposed to the law. The relation between justice
and law constitutes a heterogeneous rapport without opposition. This is
the same agreement, for example, that exists between the unconditional
Law of hospitality and its concrete determination under juridical and political forms.
Justice is not, in other words, purely and simply outside the law, but
rather configures a temporalising movement that has traversed law since
its foundation. But this is not all, for this relation also constitutes a benefit, because it establishes an economy of relations capable of sheltering
law from the violence of the raw ethic of the face-to-face encounter
that Derrida has already denounced by 1964 in his Violence and Metaphysic: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas, which rejects the
ideal of a pure and simple heterology.5 As with Derridas encounter
with Husserl,6 here the central issue is the negotiation that takes place
around the possibility of purity and the consequent affirmation of the necessity of contamination. Since there is no pure interiority watching over
expression, a pure alterity is neither thinkable nor even utterable, a pure
thought of otherness. First, however, in order to develop these ideas, we
must return to our opening questions, this time in their given order.
3. Logonomocentrism
We began with the last question in order to sketch an initial response, but
let us now begin again with the first question: why has juridical theory
paid so little attention to Derrida? Again, the response is simple, or at
least it can be simplified. Legal theory has paid so little attention to Derrida because, in Derridas phrase, it is always already (and perhaps because
of the same disciplinary codes) the victim of a logocentric, or better, a
logonomocentric bias.7 In short, because of its innumerable and often
4
5
6
7
Derrida 1992a, 46; Derrida 2005b, 81.

Derrida 2002c, 97; Derrida 1999a.
Derrida 1979e; Derrida 2003a.
Douzinas/Warrington/McVeigh 1993, 27.
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Alberto Andronico
refined contemporary inflections, legal theory still continues today to

think that law is simply an object that is immediately present, closed
within itself and contained by determinate boundaries in a manner
that allows us to respond to the fundamental question, quid ius? .8
The study of law that results from this point of view is deeply symptomatic. A degree in jurisprudence is still organised around the 18th-century
notion (that is, after the establishment of the Napoleonic code for civil
law) that the law is the only subject one need study in order to understand law. One does not study political philosophy, sociology, or rarely
even ethics. For reasons that would be interesting to investigate (but,
we cannot examine here) there are courses in political economy, as well
as in philosophy of law. Furthermore, these courses have little effect, except to dress up a role that is justly marginal (and, we should note, important for its marginality),9 and which is by now increasingly understood by students of law either as simple introductory matter for the
study of juridical grammar, or as a receptacle of ethical (or bioethical) clichs.
Given this framework, which is still strongly marked (whether we like
it or not) by obsolete distinctions between juridical positivism and natural
law, it is easy to understand why Derrida still receives so little attention in
legal studies. Within the framework of law, it seems to make no sense to
read his texts. There could be nothing more unnatural, in fact, than an
encounter with Derrida, and this is the case for two distinct reasons. First,
because in Derrida we find the notion that law (as opposed to juridical
positivism), like every other system, cannot close itself off once and for
all, since it is constitutively and originally traversed by its other. Whether
it is called violence or justice is not important (at least for our purposes
here), because in either case law is traversed as much by politics as by ethics (or by economics). Secondly, because in terms of natural law, for Derrida, justice is not an idea, a value, or a requirement written in the human
soul from which we might derive Law. Rather, justice for Derrida is not
representable, nor even realisable. Perhaps it is better to say that it is literally the impossible, with the caveat that the impossible of which we
8
From a deconstructionist perspective, even the contemporary interpretive theory

of law remains a prisoner of this metaphysics of presence that typifies the previous semantic theory. On the by-now celebrated distinction between semantic
theory and interpretive theory, see Dworkin 1986. For an introduction to the relationship between hermeneutics and deconstruction, on the other hand, see Michelfelder/Palmer 1989.
Derrida 1997c, ix.
243
speak is not opposed to that which is possible so much as the condition of

possibility,10 or again, heterogeneity without opposition.
4. An equivocation
Why, then, have jurists read so little Derrida? Simply because the law
about which Derrida speaks is not the law that jurists study.11 In order
to read Derrida, legal theory must begin to think differently about its object of study. It is doubtful that it has even begun such a process. Even
before this, however, legal jurisprudence will have to confront the fact
that what we study today in the faculties of Law is a legal form that in
many respects no longer exists, since it still finds its keystone in the centralism of the nation-state, the disappearance, or at least the weakening,
of which is generally denounced today. But let us come to the second
question: why have jurists (often) read Derrida so poorly? And in what
sense? To be sure, this is not the place to review the various inflections
of deconstruction in the juridical debate.12 Here we simply want to emphasise an equivocation that seems to gather around this problem, which
we can express straightforwardly as deconstructions tendency to gravitate
toward a method that is applicable to the study of law.
Here we ought to give a few examples to represent a (postmodern)
ideological critique. This approach is to caution against yielding to interpretations in the manner of Critical Legal Studies,13 or returning to transcendent notions of justice as an eternal value emanating from the human
soul, as authors such as Jack M. Balkin14 have suggested. In these examples, deconstruction seems to be taken for nothing more than a cultural
mode, perhaps a little outdated, a diverting invention of the latest engag
intellectual in the French mould. These conclusions risk inevitability if
we continue to peruse Derridas texts for answers to problems in legal
10 Derrida 1997b, 12.
11 This is also true of law, as Giovanna Borradori has so lucidly demonstrated in her
discussion of ethics and politics, in Borradori 2003, 193.
12 To give a broader purview on the problem, I must refer to my work in this area,
specifically that dedicated to the different translations of deconstruction with regard to Legal Theory. See Andronico 2002.
13 For a general introduction to CLS, see Unger 1975, Kennedy 1976, Unger 1983,
Kelman 1984, Kelman 1987, Tushnet 1991, Carrino 1992, Boyle 1992, Minda
1995 and Paul 2001.
14 Balkin 1987; Balkin 1994; Balkin 1996.
244
Alberto Andronico
theory. However, the doubt remains that this is not the most productive
way of reading Derrida, at least if one wants to learn something from his
work rather than criticise deconstruction for vagueness. Conversely, there
is another alternative, although to discover it we will need to abandon the
idea that deconstruction can simply be applied to legal theory, as Michel
Rosenfeld15 and, even more forcefully, Pierre Schlag have suggested:
There can be no question of applying Derridean deconstruction to law in
the sense in which the discursive practice of Law and work understands
application of a foreign discipline to law. Indeed, to apply Derridean deconstruction in this nave sense would only be conceivable once deconstruction had been transformed into a theory, a technique, a method, or a type of
interpretation. But to transform deconstruction into a theory, etc. is to relocate deconstruction and confine it to the already inscribed logocentric matrices of traditional legal thought.16
This is an important development, because the application of deconstruction to the study of law would signal the transformation of deconstruction into one of the theories to which jurists increasingly turn, subordinating it to the all but neutral forms of legal discourse and thereby emptying it of its subversive force. In point of fact, the legalistic order of discourse constitutes these masterful theories as external subjects of study,
giving them the appearance of importance without any real effect on
legal theory. Whence the challenge issued by Derrida (and emphasised
by Schlag) that there is no outside the text (il ny a pas de hors-texte), to
which the jurists have obstinately replied, I am outside the text (Le
hors de texte cest moi), thereby reintroducing the same metaphysics
of presence that deconstruction aims to put into question. Therefore, if
we ask why jurists influenced by Derrida have read him so poorly, the answer can only be this: because they have used deconstruction like any
other method that a subject can utilise as a solution to problems internal to his/her object of study. In order to better understand this situation, it is important to recall, however cursorily, what Derrida said
about deconstruction.
15 Rosenfeld 1998, 29.

16 Schlag 1990, 1656.
245
5. Everything and nothing

Let us resume the argument here:
All the same, and in spite of appearances, deconstruction is neither an analysis nor a critique, and its translation would have to take that into consideration. It is not an analysis in particular because the dismantling of a structure
is not a regression toward a simple element, toward an undecomposable origin.
These values, like that of analysis, are themselves philosophemes subject to
deconstruction. No more is it a critique, in a general sense or in a Kantian
sense. The instance of krinein or krisis (decision, choice, judgment, discernment) is itself, as is all the apparatus of transcendental critique, one of the
essential themes or objects of deconstruction. I would say the same
about method. Deconstruction is not a method and cannot be transformed
into one. Especially if the technical and procedural significations of the
word are stressed. [] Deconstruction is not even an act or an operation.
Not only because there is something patient or passive about it (as Blanchot says, more passive than passivity, than the passivity that is opposed to
activity). Not only because it does not return to an (individual or collective)
subject who would take the initiative and apply it to an object, a text, a
theme, and so on. Deconstruction takes place, it is an event that does not
await the deliberation, consciousness, or organization of a subject, or event
of modernity. It deconstructs itself. It can be deconstructed [a se dconstruit].
The it [a] is not here an impersonal thing that is opposed to some egological subjectivity. It is in deconstruction [en deconstruction] (Littr says: to deconstruct itself [se dconstruire] to lose its construction). And the se of se
dconstruire, which is not the reflexivity of an ego or of a consciousness, bears
the whole enigma.17
It is not an analysis, nor a critique, nor an act; it is not an operation, nor a

method. Thus: What deconstruction is not? everything of course! What
is deconstruction? nothing of course! I do not think, for all these reasons,
that it is a good word [un bon mot]. It is certainly not elegant [beau].18
This is how Derrida describes deconstruction. As is well known, he
wrote this in a letter to the Islamologist, Toshihiko Izutsu, with regard
to finding an appropriate translation for the concept of deconstruction.
Not by chance, the letter closes with the suggestion of finding another,
more beautiful to translate, given that no translation can avoid traducing
its original, even though it is equally true that there is no original sense
that can be corrupted in the first place. This helps to clarify why deconstruction cannot simply be applied to law: because to be in play means
to live in the event, to experience something that falls beyond any hori17 Derrida 2008, 4 5.
18 Derrida 2008, 6.
246
Alberto Andronico
zon of anticipation and any possible structure. And this, finally, is what
enables that a se dconstruit.
If we bring this interpretation to bear on juridical theory, it means
that law is not an object for deconstruction seen from an abstract, external
point of view, because it is always already in the process of deconstruction.
Simply put, the law deconstructs itself. And we might add, from the inside, if this did not beg the question of inside and outside that deconstruction destabilises. But let us come back to the point at hand. We
must remember that Derrida speaks of deconstruction in terms of a
kind of general strategy articulated in two phases: first, the overturning
of the hierarchical subordination of terms; and second, the invention
of a new concept that, while emerging from an oppositional give-andtake, cannot be reduced to terms within this opposition.19 It is important
to be precise here, if for no other reason than because legal theory has frequently stopped at the first phase of this strategy, neglecting the second
even though it is decidedly more productive. Undoubtedly, deconstruction does not consist in the simple overturning of consolidated conceptual dichotomies (e. g. form and substance, fact and value, norm and decision, law and justice). This first stage only forms the first movement,
after which it is necessary to leave this opposition behind so as to
evade the pitfall of the Hegelian dialectic, and instead engage in conceptual invention.
At this point, Derridas panoply of names comes into play under
terms such as the unity of the simulacrum or undecidability, the purpose of which is to do the impossible, that is, to speak difference. In this
sense, we can speak of the pharmakon as neither remedy nor poison, as
the difference between remedy and poison. Similarly, the gramma is neither a signifier nor a signified, but the difference between these two sides
of the sign; the arche-writing is not speech, nor the writing, but the difference between speaking and writing; the diffrance is not unity, nor is it
difference, but the difference between unity and difference.20 We could
extend this list indefinitely. The concept of the city of refuge, for example, exceeds the distinction between City and State (as well as the hierarchy that follows from this relationship).21 We can also add justice to this
list, corresponding to Derridas discussion in his essay Force of Law, where
he argues that it cannot be reduced to justice-as-law, nor to justice-out19 Derrida 2004d, 38.
20 Derrida 2004d, 24; Derrida 2002c, 1.
21 Derrida 2001b, 4.
247
side-law, but rather classifies their undecidable difference.22 As we move

forward with our discussion, we should keep this in mind to avoid the
frequent misunderstandings that have occurred at the level of legal theory.
Pertaining to this, the example of Balkins transcendental reading of deconstruction can serve as a representative sampling.
We are dealing, therefore, with two phases, which, however, do not
always come in the same order. In fact, the overturning and the creative
transgression encircle one another incessantly, giving rise to an interminable process of textual decomposition and reconstruction.23 In this sense,
deconstruction describes a movement that never stops, and never fulfils
itself once and for all. It is the movement of thought itself, we might
say. This is why, despite the way it has been used by legal theory, deconstruction is anything but a theoretical, ethical, juridical, or political project.24
6. The remainder
Deconstruction cannot simply be applied to law, therefore, because it is
not an analysis, a critique, an act, or an operation. Nor is it a method
or a project that can be imputed to some subject-position. Rather, it is
an event. And it is therefore something that takes place beyond any expectation or anticipation. Such is the case for principles such as justice and
those above that have been listed. Derrida never tires of emphasising
this for the simple reason that with deconstruction, as with justice, the
stakes are played for the sake of the other and the possibility of its future.
As is well known, this is one of the keystones of his work. In every identity, in every presence, a mechanism of sublation [rimozione] enters into
play that allows the other (previously relegated to the margins) to enter
the dominant discourse. Such is the destiny of speech: in order to constitute itself as a sign, it relies on the writing that excludes it from the present.25 In this way, it is similar to consciousness where self-presence (one of
philosophys fundamental starting points) can only establish itself
through the suppression [rimozione] of an other that inhabits the self
at its origins. And the same claims can be made about the juridical system, which, like the nation, closes itself off by virtue of an act of forget22
23
24
25
Resta 2001, 83.

Derrida 2004d, 39.
Derrida 1990c, 63.
Derrida 1979, 93.
248
Alberto Andronico
ting that occludes an act of violence at its foundation, thereby forgetting

its own origins.26 Therefore, we can say that alterity is inherent at the origins of identity to the degree that there is no culture of the self without a
culture of the other.27 This is the root of the idea of hospitality, to which
Derrida insistently returns in his final works, where he argues that hospitality must be seen as a fundamental condition before it can be understood as a duty. As such, hospitality is an ethic which does not need foundational rules to welcome an other, a stranger, but rather demonstrates an
openness at work in this relationship with the other, this you that always
already, contaminates the presence of a self, an I, while at the same time
rendering this self possible.28
And now we are ready to return to our third question: Why should
jurists read Derrida? Certainly not to find a method or a project, but to
learn something much more elementary, although no less important. In a
single line, law is never purely and simply law. We must learn, in short,
that in law there is always a space opening onto something else. This is
the space of deconstruction. Similarly, we can understand justice in
terms of the future of an other at the heart of law, haunting it like a specter. This is exemplified in Derridas discussion of Marx. As Marxism is
dead, he suggests that we should take up Marx again, reading him as
the other that triumphant capitalism has relegated to its margins. Nonetheless, Marx is still capable of providing a resource for thinking about
the other of law, politics, and, more specifically, justice. The justice
about which Derrida speaks, in fact, is not present, nor present-able; it
is neither a value nor an idea, nor even a concept, but instead it is an
event of the impossible, the promise of presenting the unpresentable
that presupposes an anachrony at the heart of the present.
Beyond right, and still more beyond juridicism, beyond morality, and still
more beyond moralism, does not justice as relation to the other suppose
on the contrary the irreducible excess of a disjointure or an anachrony,
some Un-Fuge, some out of joint dislocation in Being and in time itself,
a disjointure that, in always risking the evil, expropriation, and injustice (adikia) against which there is no calculable insurance, would alone be able to do
justice or to render justice to the other as other? A doing that would not
amount only to action and a rendering that would not come down just to
restitution?29
26
27
28
29
Derrida
Derrida
Derrida
Derrida
1992a, 47.
1992b, 10.
2000; Resta 2003.
2006, 32.
249
Justice is therefore an other than the law, but it is also an other within law,
as Derrida specifies. This remainder always already contaminates laws
alleged purity, thereby opening up a space for deconstruction.30 This
means that law itself is never purely and simply present, but is always
in the process of deconstruction. The question of justice, moreover, opens
at the point of non-contemporaneity to itself of the living present,31
that is, at the point of its untimeliness (understood in terms of difference), both the point of its deferment as the production of difference
and as the movement of dislocation. As with Hamlets lament about
time, the present is in fact always structurally out of joint. The specter
of justice traverses this time, presenting itself as given, like a blind-spot
that nonetheless permits the closure of law as a system. In fact, it is this
blind-spot which permits the closure of any system, but at the same time,
presents the fault lines that prevent complete closure.
7. Internal and external

As Derrida summarises, the coherent system is an impossibility.32 The law
is certainly no exception, we might add. The juridical system, insofar as it
is a system, does not function. Herewith, we should be especially clear. It is
not merely a matter of recognising the structural incoherence of the juridical order (an observation which the theory of law has not failed to
make), but having this incoherence positively affirmed, which prevents
the law from closing into itself. In turn, this allows the system to function. In other words, the juridical system, like any other system, functions
insofar as it does not function. And this for the simple reason that it is
founded in difference, neither purely and simply internal to law (as
Hans Kelsens Grundnorm would have it, or again as Hart argues in his
theory of the rule of recognition), nor purely and simply external to
it, whether law is understood in political or natural terms. In sum, the
origin of law is contaminated by that which the system wants to keep
outside, especially by that force that would claim to regulate but
which instead comes into play at the very moment that it defines its subject.33
30
31
32
33
Heritier 2009, 96.

Derrida 2006, xviii.
Derrida/Ferraris 2001, 3.
Derrida 1992a, 13.
250
Alberto Andronico
The foundation of law, in other words, is a mystical foundation, as

Montaigne would say, an idea that Derrida takes up again and develops in
Force of Law. This mystical foundation calls (according to Pascal) for a
system in which the strong ought to be just, and the just ought to be
strong. Once again, however, it is necessary to clarify: this interpretation
is not taking up once again the old adage of law as the mask of power,
whether economic or political, if for no other reason than because the
force about which Derrida is speaking provides yet another example
of the undecidability: the (impossible) name of the difference between
legitimate force and illegitimate violence.34 The question, then, is
much more fundamental. Once again we are dealing first and foremost
with the metaphysics of presence, which is always principally preoccupied with putting the discourse in order by establishing a conceptual hierarchy through the exclusion of an outside, traditionally understood in
terms of an ancillary supplement that is inessential and ultimately noxious.
To keep the outside out. This is the inaugural gesture of logic itself, of good
sense insofar as it accords with the self-identity of that which is: being is
what it is, the outside is outside and the inside inside.35
However, the exclusion of this outside leaves a trace just as being does
for Heidegger, which in its self-presenting signals an un-presentable origin that constitutes its condition for being. And this is where deconstruction intervenes, putting this trace back into circulation in order to continually relaunch a meaning that hastens to reclose, once and for all, in
a definitive interpretation. As we have noted, it is a matter of demonstrating how the internal depends on its external, just as any identity conserves
within itself the traces of an alterity that it excludes in order to constitute
itself, calling us back to laws contamination by force. In this way, deconstruction responds to the desire for system on the part of jurists by demonstrating its dysfunctional structure: the system is possible to the degree
that it is impossible. The outside haunts the inside like a specter, rendering it possible through a process of sublation [rimozione], or better,
through a process of immunisation.
This explains Derridas attention to the institutional implications of
the order of theoretical discourse that constitutes one of the characteristic
34 Not by accident, Derrida calls attention to the undecidability of the term Gewalt. See Derrida 1992a, 6.
35 Derrida 2004a, 131.
251
traits of the practice of deconstruction, which can be understood as a

work that takes place around the process of mediation by which we approach the thing itself .36 In this capacity, Derridas work has been expressly counter-institutional in its declaration of a project between the
critique of institutions and the dream of a different institution:
In abstract and general terms, what remains constant in my thinking on this
question is indeed a critique of institutions, but one that sets out not from
the utopia of a wild and spontaneous pre- or non-institution, but rather
from counter-institutions. I do not think there is, or should be, the non-institutional. I am always torn between the critique of institutions and the
dream of an other institution that, in an interminable process, will come
to replace institutions that are oppressive, violent and inoperative. The
idea of a counter-institution, neither spontaneous, wild nor immediate, is
the most permanent motif that, in a way, has guided me in my work.37
Thus, there is no call for some utopia uncontaminated by violence, but

simply a critique internal to the institutions themselves with a view to
their (im)possible transformation. In sum, these are the stakes for deconstruction, which practices a mode of thought capable of allowing the possibility of dreaming other institutions, different (and better) than those
that currently exist.38
8. Proclaiming the dream without betraying it

We will finish with a discussion of this dream. On September 22, 2001,
Derrida received the Theodor W. Adorno Prize. On the occasion of his
acceptance he read a text in which he expressed his debt to and gratitude
for the work of the eclectic master of the Frankfurt School.39 One of the
themes (if not the theme) of this speech touched on the relationship between waking and sleeping, in other words, dreaming. It is with the dream
that Derrida is primarily concerned, the dream that Walter Benjamin
spoke of in a letter to Gretel Adorno. Of course, Derrida does not fail
to call for a return to Adornos work, but it is nonetheless through Benjamin that he formulates the theme of his talk beyond the initial hints
36 Derrida 2002a; Derrida 2004b.
37 Derrida/Ferraris 2001, 50.
38 With regard to these stakes, see Vattimo 2007, 135, in which the author advances
several unavoidable questions.
39 Derrida 2005a, 164.
252
Alberto Andronico
provided by the title. For the dream, while it might seem like an idle
theme, is anything but insignificant:
Whats the difference between dreaming and thinking youre dreaming? And
first of all who has the right to ask that question? The dreamer deep in the
experience of his night or the dreamer when he wakes up? And could a
dreamer speak of his dream without waking himself up? Could he name
the dream in general? Could he analyze the dream properly and even use
the word dream deliberately without interrupting and betraying, yes, betraying sleep.40
The question is not idle for the simple reason that it returns us to the
confines of philosophical discourse. To this question, philosophy responds with a certain no, and in this response, Derrida notes, resides
the force of philosophys essence. But this is obviously not the only possible response. There is at least one other response: Yes, perhaps, sometimes.41 It is precisely the oscillation between these two responses that
Derrida claims to love and admire in Adornos work, which we can summarise as a continuous self-expulsion to the margins of philosophical discourse. According to Derrida, the possibility of thinking singularity is
what is at stake in this incessant oscillation between philosophy and its
defining other in Adornos work. This is thinking the event, a kind
of deconstruction derived from the pure and simple opposition between
sleeping and waking that incessantly returns to the singular rather than
the universal.
Although Derrida was speaking about Adorno, he could just as well
have been speaking about himself. The deconstruction of the opposition
between sleeping and waking (made possible by the undecidability that
characterises the third term, the dream) enables Derrida to formulate a
question that is decisive for his own political, ethical, and (we would
add) juridical thought:
Could there be an ethics or politics of dreaming that did not yield to the
imaginary or to the utopian, and was not an abandonment, irresponsible,
and evasive?42
In other words, can we daydream? Can we dream while awake? Can we,
in sum, do the impossible? After all, these are always at stake for Derrida, to commit to the possibility of the impossible, that (im)possibility
that constitutes the paradoxical, quasi-transcendent condition, as
40 Derrida 2005a, 165.
41 Derrida 2005a, 166.
42 Derrida 2005a, 168.
253
much gift as invention, of justice and democracy.43 This expression,

moreover, closely echoes Adorno in his famous Portrait of Walter Benjamin, a connection that Derrida does not fail to note:
In the form of the paradox of the impossible possibility, mysticism and enlightenment are joined for the last time in him [Benjamin]. He overcame the
dream without betraying it [ohne ihn zu verraten] and making himself the accomplice in that on which the philosophers have always agreed: that it shall
not be.44
Proclaiming the dream without betraying it. Without dismissing the

dreams exigency toward an open future, this proscription is the fundamental, aporetic imperative that deconstruction seeks to express. The possibility of the impossible can only be dreamed, Derrida emphasises in his
discussion of Adorno. Such a possibility not only can, but must be
dreamed, even if it cannot be proved by the wide-awake light of reason.
These closing remarks trace the argument made by Kant, who maintained
that if we cannot be free, we must think (or dream, Derrida would say) of
being free until an ethical position becomes possible. Thus, for Derrida
we must dream the possibility of the impossible so that a space might
open for the gift, the invention, the decision, responsibility, hospitality,
justice, democracy: for the arrival of the other.45 Thus, if we ask why jurists have read Derrida so little and so poorly, the only response must be
that they have kept their eyes open, but have been unable to dream. And
if we ask why they ought to have (or ought to in the future) read Derrida
better, the answer is simple: to learn to daydream. This is his ultimate lesson, and perhaps his most important.
Translated by Wilson Kaiser
43 Andronico 2006, 163.

44 Adorno 1981, 241, cited in Derrida 2005a, 168.
45 In fact, one finds here the maximization of the transcendental position that
Maurizio Ferraris shows to be already at work in Derridas reading of Husserl.
See Ferraris 2003, 44.
Law as Practical Knowledge:

Deconstruction, Pragmatism, and the Promise
of Classical Practical Philosophy
Jnos Frivaldszky
1. The rehabilitation of practical philosophy
The knowledge of classical Roman jurists was, due to its practical character, both juristic and practical in the philosophical sense. This way of
thinking, however, was abandoned after Renaissance humanism1 by the
modernists, who tried to construct closed, axiomatic and deductive scientific systems. The modern image of law, conceived as a legal or rational
order closed into a scientific system, has lost its practical philosophical
nature characterised by classical natural law and dialectic argumentation.
In the second half of the 20th century, practical philosophy was rehabilitated (as in the case of the well known debate on the Rehabilitierung der
praktischen Philosophie) in Germany (and elsewhere in continental Europe) as well as in English-speaking countries. This brought with it
some concepts of justice and practical philosophy (prudence, political
friendship, dialectical argumentation, topics, etc.) back into mainstream
philosophical discourse. The Aristotelian, and partly Thomistic, concepts
of practical philosophy have played a key role in this process and the subsequent debates alike. Aristotelian influence, in the form of classical natural law (Michel Villey), first appeared in the thought of (classical)
Roman jurists, and was, after a long gap, received by todays legal philosophers. The major part of philosophical debates about law is now conducted along Aristotelian, and partly Thomistic, lines. In the last three
decades, Aquinas has been rehabilitated by advocates of neo-classical
natural law within a highly specific framework of moral and political
(i. e. practical) philosophy. Certain exponents of this current also draw inspiration from the thought of the analytic philosopher Herbert L. A.
1
Manzin 2007, 85 100. Cf. also Manzin 1994; Manzin 2008.
256
Jnos Frivaldszky
Hart, who describes law as a social practice, thus opening the way for a
philosophy of law that concentrates on practical reasons and justification.
Nor should one forget the postmodernist conception of law. Unlike
those mentioned above, this current draws on certain leftist and libertarian traditions, but in some cases also on existentialism and pragmatism,
regarding law as the emancipatory social practice of political justice.
Thus, contemporary legal thinking is for the most part characterised
by a practical approach in the broadest sense of the word. This raises two
questions. First: in what sense does contemporary legal theory and philosophy consider the lawyers activity as practical? And, second: how is
it to be regarded from the perspective of classical natural law?
2. The postmodernist conception of law:

Law as the emancipatory social practice of political justice
Let us start with the contemporary postmodernist conception of justice,
which regards the life of law as some kind of a manifestation of political
practice. This seems to be a promising starting point, as this is the approach that has its source in the classical way of practical philosophy
and is the one we seek to follow most closely. There are two main currents
of postmodernist theories (or rather counter-theories),2 both very influential in legal thinking. The one was developed, by among others,
Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish, and may be termed neo-pragmatist social
criticism. This theory is really just a close relative of postmodernism.
The other bears the hallmark imprint of Jacques Derrida3 and Michel
Foucault, and makes use of deconstructionist, post-structuralist and
other methods of (sometimes ironic or even nihilistic)4 criticism. Both
theories are practice-oriented and pragmatical in their own ways. They
are sometimes regarded as methods. 5 They entail the denial of the exis2
3
4
5
Minda 1995, 229 231.

The work of Jack M. Balkin, to mention just one author, was deeply influenced
by the thought of Jacques Derrida. See Balkin 2005, 719 740. For a comprehensive analysis of the influence of Derrida on legal theory, see Andronico 2002.
Ironically, Rorty, who is an exponent of the other current, considers himself ironic as well. Some authors do not profess to be nihilistic, whereas others do so
proudly, for example, Vattimo 2004.
Derrida himself objected to regarding the deconstructionist approach as a method, but it doubtlessly became a method in its American practice. See Andronico
2002. Balkin 1987, 743 786.
Law as Practical Knowledge
257
tence of an objective and hierarchical order of things, an intrinsic nature

that would have a normative content and should be observed by lawyers
due to its (legal) validity.
Let us now turn to the philosophical roots of neo-pragmatist social
criticism to see how pragmatism influenced legal thinking, and particularly the currents of postmodernism, in the English-speaking world.
3. Pragmatist and neo-pragmatist social criticism

Oliver W. Holmes was admittedly sceptical of the existence of any kind of
natural law.6 He was deeply influenced by the pragmatist doctrines he became acquainted with in the Metaphysical Club,7 which he founded together with William James, and Charles S. Peirce, who later became the
founding father of pragmatism. In an all too superficial reconstruction,
the school of pragmatism held that human recognition is intimately
tied up with practical experience, habits, and human action.8 This already
shows that its exponents emphasised the empirical and socially bound
character of human recognition.9 The whole function of thinking as
William James summarises the main elements of Peirces pragmatism
(pragmaticism) is but one step in the production of habits of action,
where the words that express a thought play are significant only if they
contribute to its practical consequences (i. e. if they lead to a different
6
7
8
George 2003, 1 11.

Cf. Maczonkai 1997, 45 47.
Endeavoring, as a man of that type naturally would, to formulate what he so
approved, he framed the theory that a conception, that is, the rational purport
of a word or other expression, lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing upon
the conduct of life; so that, since obviously nothing that might not result
from experiment can have any direct bearing upon conduct, if one can define
accurately all the conceivable experimental phenomena which the affirmation
or denial of a concept could imply, one will have therein a complete definition
of the concept, and there is absolutely nothing more in it. For this doctrine he invented the name pragmatism. Peirce 1905, 163. See Rorty 1999, xx f.
Derrida also discovered the semiotics of Charles Peirce as a predecessor, and mentioned it as a proto-deconstructionist conception: Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the deconstruction of the transcendental signified [].
Derrida 1974, 49. Cf. also Boros 1998, 65 66. In this interpretation of Peircean
semiotics, signs continuously refer to one another, from which there is no escape,
that is to say, signs do not refer to any external (signified) entity or logos. Derrida
thus regards Peirces theory of language as anticipating the critique of logocentrism.
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Jnos Frivaldszky
conduct). Accordingly, to attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an

object, [] we need only consider what effects of a conceivably practical
kind the object may involve, what sensations we are to expect from it, and
what reactions we must prepare. Through this, James adds, the ultimate
test for us of what a truth means is indeed the conduct it dictates or inspires.10 In a similar vein, Richard Rorty was interested in the social effects and practical consequences of human rights rather than their substantive validity and normative content.11 This approach explains why,
as Rorty puts it, pragmatists both classical and neo- do not believe
there is a way things really are.12 The criterion for the rightness of human
rights and social relations is not human nature or the real nature of things
or human relations. From an anti-essentialist or anti-dualist perspective,
the meaning and content of a concept of any concept depends on its
social practice, which is to say, on its usefulness.13 This way, however, the
life of the concept (i. e. the related social practices) can be shaped by
ideologies. American (legal) philosophy, then, is characterised by individualism and anti-naturalist pragmatism, and this latter accepts that concepts (along with their related practices) are determined by social and political ideologies. Meanwhile, (neo-)pragmatism has been associated with
relativism14 and various apparently benevolent emancipatory and egalitarian elements.15 The concepts of ideological determination and struggle have, since the linguistic turn,16 increasingly been transposed to the
socio-political sphere of language: If there is anything distinctive about
10 James 1898, 290 291.
11 Human rights are, according to Rorty, social constructs. One of their possible
motivations may be comforting ones conscience. Their practical measures are
the decrease of pain (suffering), (negative) freedom understood as the lack of intervention, and the achievement of non-discrimination. Rorty 1999, xxix, 84
87.
12 Rorty 1999, 27.
13 Rorty 1999, xix, xxii, 60.
14 But of course we pragmatists never call ourselves relativists. Usually, we define
ourselves in negative terms. We call ourselves anti-Platonists or antimetaphysicians or antifoundationalists. Rorty 1999, xvi.
15 Cf. Rorty 1999, 86.
16 It is customary to distinguish the classical pragmatists Peirce, James and
Dewey from such living neopragmatists as Quine, Goodman, Putnam and
Davidson. The break between the two is the so-called linguistic turn. [] In
the US, this turn was taken only in the 1940s and 1950s, and it was as a result
of this turn that James and Dewey ceased to be read in American philosophical
departments. Rorty 1999, 24 25.
259
pragmatism it is that it substitutes the notion of a better human future for

notions of reality, reason and nature.17 Holmes only argued that
law exists in experience only,18 and stated that he could not accept any
kind of objective natural law.19 Postmodernist thinkers of today seem
to shape the right and politically acceptable meaning of concepts and
the corresponding social practices by way of insisting on human rights
and the right political order in the name of political correctness, thus exerting an indirect influence on right judicial decision-making. According to the definitive postmodernist and neo-pragmatist philosopher of
our time, Richard Rorty, there is no human nature in the essentialist
sense, and therefore there are no inalienable human rights either.20 Unlike
classical legal philosophy, contemporary mainstream thinkers do not regard man as a social being by nature, and consequently deny that natural
law or the law of nature could regulate interpersonal or social relations.
According to them, there is no inherent nature of human relations, as
regulated by natural law and the (normative) nature of things (i. e. of social relations). Thus, they assign this regulative role to political ideologies
and simplifying buzzwords. The roots of American postmodernist antiessentialism, then, go back to the pragmatist tradition. Human nature
and the nature of human relations in the classical sense are neglected,
whereas the main exponents of this movement have always felt a deep political responsibility to shape a better future.21 In their sense of social22 responsibility,23 American pragmatists have been guided by the desire to
17 Rorty 1999, 27.
18 The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. Holmes 1881, 1.
19 Letter from O. W. Holmes to Harold Laski, September 15, 1929. The two thinkers had an extensive correspondence in a personal and frank tone, which makes
the content of the above letter a valuable historical source. DeWolfe Howe 1953,
1183.
20 Rorty 1989, xiii, 8, 38, 52, 55. Talk of [] the rights of man, like talk of the
honour of the family or of the fatherland in danger are not suitable targets for
philosophical analysis and criticism (Rorty 1999, 83 84). Speaking of inalienable human rights, according to him, is simply a way of saying that our spade is
turned that we have exhausted our argumentative resources (Rorty 1999, 83
84). He emphasises the subjective side of human rights, together with their practical social usefulness. See Rorty 1999, 83 86.
21 Rorty 1999, 27.
22 Molnar 1961, 269 273.
23 William James only pleaded for a path-finding or directing role of the philosopher, see James 1898, 288. According to Rorty, similarly to the engineer or the
lawyer, the philosopher is instrumental in solving concrete problems emerging in
260
Jnos Frivaldszky
break with old and bad feudal European traditions.24 According to

Rorty, this outdated tradition did believe in a theory of human reason
adapted and responsive to the inherent nature of things. Here, however,
we are going to discuss the late medieval conception of law, classical and
naturalist, where the practical essentialism of juristic argumentation was
paired with an institutional social dialogue25 constantly seeking arguments.26 In the 11th-13th centuries, dialectical legal argumentation was
practical and discursive, while focusing on truth and justice (i. e. observing the nature of things).27
Today, exponents of liberal and emancipatory political ideologies try
to revolutionise interpersonal relations through claim rights put in the
language of human rights. Throughout modernity, it was the macro-social
and political relations that such egalitarian movements appealed to,
whereas so-called postmodernity now looks at interpersonal relations
on a micro scale, for example, those of man and woman, husband and
wife, parent and child, teacher and pupil, and so on. Since our age cannot
handle natural inequalities (i. e. natural social differences between persons
of equal dignity)28 these thinkers try to subvert what they regard as violent traditional metaphysical oppositions and hierarchies, in the name of
freedom and equality. They do so through a deconstructionist criticism of
the institutions that maintain these oppositions and hierarchies, like natural social roles and their institutional forms.29 The pragmatist way of
philosophical recognition has been tied up with the practicality of socially
engaged American academics.30 Gradually, egalitarian leftist ideas became
dominant in liberal thought, and radical (leftist) ideologies from the old
continent received a very warm welcome from American intellectuals. It
is small wonder, then, that the views of Jacques Derrida were particularly
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
concrete situations, where the language of the past confronts with the needs of
the future. Rorty 1995, 197 199.
Rorty 1999, 25, 27.
In the postmodernist pragmatism of Rorty, the result of the debate as duel is
what is considered to be true, wihout any kind of objective reference or grounding theory. Rorty 1989, 52.
Frivaldszky 2009, 229 270.
Grossi 1995.
Dumont 1983, 296.
Cf. Rorty 1989, 134; Culler 1985, 85, 156 159, 165 166, 173; Frivaldszky
2008, 5 29.
Molnar 1961, 260 288.
261
influential in American jurisprudence and legal philosophy.31 As Thomas

Molnar, a well known philosopher who also lived in the United States,
put it, the enemies of authority are particularly vehement in their savage
attack on the court,32 while granting privileges to non-conformist ideas
and their exponents by the censorial means of political correctness.33
Radical individualism is associated with moral relativism, which could
result in the loss of purpose and content of law and every other kind of
right, including human rights, due to its devaluation of truth. Still, legal
content is subjected to egalitarian and libertarian political ideologies,
which infiltrate relativism. Thus, interpersonal relations have no natural
legal normativity any more, nor does the human individual have any natural essence. It is therefore the radical individualist and relativist doctrines
of libertarian (and at the same time egalitarian) political ideologies that
now shape social relations, in terms of discourse as well as actions. Everyone is considered completely equal qua free, and the individual expressions of this freedom or its changes, which depend on the free deliberation of the individual only, cannot be limited by any kind of reference to
a natural order. The human individual does not fulfil herself in the social
relations that are inseparable from being a person. Quite on the contrary,
the conscience of the individualised self in regard to what is right (and
consequently her conduct) is determined and oriented by the codes of
the elite of the politically permeated civil society. These codes are formulated in human-rights terms, in favour of the ideological and political
purposes of relativism, libertarianism and egalitarism. It seems, then,
that the postmodernist notion of eventuality (Rorty) or the social
power of contingency, which replaced the regulative function of natural
moral laws and natural law, is by no means random and free in the
world of law, nor has it the character of expert rationality (N. Luh31 Derrida had a deep influence on contemporary radical legal theory in America.
Derridas conception of justice as deconstruction had a strong influence on both
American and European legal thinking. See Derrida 1989/1990, 933. The question may arise whether Derridean deconstruction belongs to philosophy or politics, or it is rather a peculiar way of reading, a technique of interpretation. We
think it is a philosophical practice of reading texts (written ones as well as social
practices), which implies certain practical consequences in terms of practical criticism and emancipatory (social) policies. This latter was not denied by the later
Derrida either.
32 Molnar 1976, 50.
33 Steven G. Gey describes how new censorship and postmodernist philosophy
struggle against each other in legal thinking, and how new censors transform
postmodernist doctrines claimed to be irrefutable. Gey 1996, 193 297.
262
Jnos Frivaldszky
mann),34 but is instead determined by planned constraints of political

power ideologies.
4. The political practice of deconstruction

from the perspective of a classical conception of law
Underlying the deconstructionist conception of law there is an anthropological view that is not only strongly individualistic but also conflictual.
Its exponents claim that (human) rights work through continuous and
regular conflicts of power, much like the sophists idea of debate.35 In
the final analysis, such a view transposes legal problems into the practical
social policies related to the power dimensions of discursive and oppressing hierarchical oppositions, which can then be emancipated and/
or deconstructed or subverted. Human rights that rightly dominate
legal thinking thus become the main point of reference for substantive
law and legal decisions in an age where a philosophical concept of
human nature is not only abandoned, but seems politically incorrect.
How, then, could one justify an argument or choice between mutually
limiting rights in concrete cases of collision between human rights, if
human nature, or its true philosophy (i. e. one that is sound in a juristic
sense), or objective and substantive elements of interpersonal justice, can
hardly be addressed any more?
Today, when practical philosophy, which is aimed at giving an answer
to the above problems, and a practice-oriented philosophical pragmatism
replace theoretical knowledge36 in legal thinking, the main question of
our discussion comes very forcefully to bear. What does the actual content of these theories look like if compared to the classical (Roman)
legal knowledge and practice, which originally emerged as a form of practical philosophy? Practical philosophy, to be sure, is the suitable way for a
relativist and anti-essentialist postmodern age. Yet, the question is wheth34 As Bruno Romano shows in several of his works, legal communication within the
legal system described by Luhmann, where postmodern complexity is reduced in
accordance with technical rationality, is neither legal nor human. See Romano
1995; Romano 1996.
35 The topic of Michel Foucaults first course in the Coll ge de France was the sophists, a movement he had always considered important.
36 There is no deep split between theory and practice, Rorty claims, because on a
pragmatist view all so-called theory which is not wordplay is always already
practice. Rorty 1999, xxv.
263
er these approaches can be reconciled with a reality-oriented juristic perspective. We have seen that there are many forms of practical philosophy,37 but postmodern theories are as far from the classical sense of
that phrase as can be. The main divide of different classics-based theories
and philosophies of law is between whether a given practical philosophy
of law should focus on the (real) nature of human relationships or the nature of things, as the classical authors thought, or whether it should rather
focus, as English-speaking analytic philosophers think, on the rational
reasons of right decision or the justification of a given institution, and
the logic of its corresponding rules. This latter approach actually concentrates on the linguistic and logical nature of practical rationality that is
bound to reasons and justifications.38
It seems that the practical philosophy of the classical jurists is the pivotal point of reference. While postmodernist thinkers struggle with the
Platonist (!) heritage of essentialism, certain currents of the Anglophone
analytic school, with central figures of neo-classical natural law among
them, reinvent the practical philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas, albeit
in a peculiar neo-Kantian and analytic (Hartian) vein.39 In the classical
period (i. e. among the Romans and in the Middle Ages) legal thinking
was permeated by Aristotelian practical philosophy and dialectical method, which means that it was not dominated by Platonic essentialism. The
question, then, remains: which one of these practical philosophies is acceptable for lawyers from a juristic perspective of practical reason?40
37 German schools and their exponents may be well known to the reader. Their
ideas also had a considerable influence on Italian practical philosophy. Most recently, see the analysis of Luigi Mengonis philosophy of law. Nogler 2007, 255
290.
38 Cf. Murphy 2001, 1 f.
39 See Grisez/Boyle/Finnis 1987, 99 151. This current takes the neo-Kantian separation of is and ought as its starting point, arguing that for a logically valid
argument, theoretical knowledge (of metaphysics and/or philosophical anthropology) and its theoretical truth (is) cannot serve as premisses to practical
(moral) conclusions (ought). See Grisez/Boyle/Finnis 1987, 101 102, 125,
127. The southern German version of neo-Kantianism, based on The Critique
of Practical Reason, is itself a practical philosophy, which regards philosophy
from a normative perspective as a science of values. See Pascher 1997. As is
known, Gustav Radbruchs conception is the most important contribution of
this approach to legal philosophy.
40 Contemporary English-speaking natural lawyers often find themselves connected
to the tradition of classical natural law through practical philosophy. It is no coincidence that the essence of practical rationality is the most frequent topic of
their works and debates. For the frequency of the expression practical reason
264
Jnos Frivaldszky
In our opinion, legal knowledge cannot be based on a critical and

sometimes even cynical deconstructionist reading of legal texts and social
practices,41 as this deconstructive philosophical practice would conceptually
separate law, understood as rules based on the unjustified violence of
power, from justice, thus transposing if analysed coherently the practice (administration?) of justice into the domain of everyday critical (political) practice of deconstruction. The world of autonomous everyday
practices is doubtless an important field of practicing justice, and political
struggle for rights may sometimes play an important role as well. Yet the
legal practice of lawyers, based on legal justice, can never be dispensed
with, as it is they who have the capacity and dedication to determine
the lawful due of the Other. While we agree with Derrida that law cannot
be identified with doctrinal rules (Non ut ex regula ius sumatur, sed ex iure
quod est, regula fiat),42 we think that legal principles should be rehabilitated in a classical sense and with a classical content.43 The way Derrida follows, we repeat, cannot therefore be right, as it identifies the concept of
justice (as separated from legal rules) with the philosophical practice of
deconstruction, not even if its respectable intention aims at restoring justice in its true, original sense (i. e. in the vein of Levinas). According to
the classical jurists, law or legal rules cannot be conceptually separated
from justice; just as this latter cannot be separated from law either. In
the latter case, the result would be moral and political, rather than
legal, philosophy, which could lead to unjust results in a legal philosophical sense.
We can agree with Ulpian, and the greatest authorities of ancient
Roman law in general,44 that lawyers are the experts of justice and fairness. We may also add that by virtue of their practical approach, they follow legal principles (as for instance the principle of giving everyone his or
41
42
43
44
see George 1996, 369. For John Finnis, practical philosophy means a systematic
and critical approach directed at human goods, which requires practical rationality
and focuses on decision and action. See Finnis 1999, 12. Neo-classical naturallaw thinking adopts the same perspective, and describes law in light of its fundamental values and claims of practical rationality. This is structured by three interrelated problems: the search for fundamental human goods; right choices; and
the determination of the conditions of practical thinking aimed at developing the
respective rules. We may say, then, that the theory of natural law means thinking
about law in light of human good [bene] and practical reason. Viola 1996, viii f.
Cf. Barcellona 2006, 181 256.
Dig. 50.17.1.
Several regulae of Roman law are, in content or structure, actually principles.
Cf. Hervada 1990, V, 1 6.
265
her due) rather than applying rigid statutory provisions unjustifiable by

justice. Yet the application of principles needs the juristic (i. e. legal skill),
of pursuing justice in a practical (prudential) sense hence the expression
iuris prudentia. Ulpian was convinced that law, justice and fairness are organically connected within natural law, which is made to work by the
practical philosophy of lawyers, through their art aimed at what is
good and equitable, that is to say, through their actual legal knowledge.45
5. Legal discourse: The sophists fight for power

or the classics dialectical juristic argument?
Today, when the practice and epistemic form of rhetoric is regaining popularity, it is important that a deeper reflection on justice and law should
not be replaced. One way of saving this kind of reflection may be to rediscover the philosophical importance of classical (ancient and medieval)
dialectical argument for legal discourses.46 As Michel Villey emphasised,
ancient rhetoric, which was the source of the jurists logic as well, was not
a mere technique of persuasion, but controversy was a much worthier
and more fruitful art leading to probable truth. it ensured the places
and the selection of questions for a meaningful debate. it was also a
rich source of other useful advice. and, finally, it led to good legal solutions.47
Of the best known scholars who contributed to the rehabilitation of
ancient Greek dialectical or topical thinking, one may mention Cham
Perelman whose new rhetoric actually returns to Aristotelian rhetoric
and the modes of ancient dialectical argument, but also Theodor Viehweg in Germany,48 and Michel Villey in France.49 The active interest
in the exploration of ancient dialectic, one that manifested itself in the
second half of the 20th century,50 has brought particularly valuable results
through the work of Enrico Berti in Italy, whose findings in the field of
45 See Frivaldszky 2007, 96 f, 102 f.
46 On ancient dialectic as the heritage of European culture, see Berti 2003, 3 26.
On the relationship between dialectic on the one hand and practical philosophy
and Gadamers hermeneutics on the other, see Berti 2002, 43 53.
47 Villey 1967, 79.
48 Viehweg 1953.
49 See Villey 2003.
50 On the beginnings of the renewed interest in ancient Greek dialectic, see Sichirollo 1961, 111 119.
266
Jnos Frivaldszky
ancient Greek dialectic have much to offer contemporary legal philosophy.51 Speaking of philosophers, the dialogical dialectic of Hans-Georg
Gadamer should also be mentioned. Gadamers intersubjective and situational approach still throws new light52 on the whole process of legal hermeneutical understanding and the reality of law itself, being at the same
time faithful to its Aristotelian roots and up-to-date.53 The link between
Gadamerian hermeneutics and Greek dialectic is highlighted also by the
title of a volume dedicated to Gadamer.54 Finally, it should not be forgotten that ancient Greek dialectical thinking has found some resonance
among English-speaking analytic philosophers as well.55
Roman juristic thinking was linked to Greek dialectical argument
rather than rhetoric with open arguments, and so the Greek tradition
did not appear among Roman jurists in the form of rhetorical argumentation before the courts but through the use of Aristotelian dialectical arguments. The material of arguments included legal-philosophical categories which were regarded from the perspective of practice.
The practical and theoretical impact as well as the consequences of
anti-essentialist, anti-dualist56 and anti-metaphysical (neo-)pragmatism
which opposes theoretical philosophy cannot yet be fully assessed. We
still think that the postmodernist practice of critical politics cannot
serve as the basis for a sound philosophy of law, nor, for that matter,
for any kind of legal philosophy whatsoever. Thus, the emancipatory
practice of postmodernist neo-pragmatism or deconstructivism, or any
51 Enrico Berti regularly publishes in journals and volumes devoted to the philosophy of law. It is partly due to his work that Italian legal philosophers started
to explore the legal dimension of dialectic argument and its promises for our
age. He also contributed to the rehabilitation of practical philosophy. Cf. Berti
2004.
52 The art of dialectic is not the art of being able to win every argument. On the
contrary, it is possible that someone practicing the art of dialectic i. e., the art of
questioning and of seeking truth comes off worse in the argument in the eyes of
those listening to it. As the art of asking questions, dialectic proves its value because only the person who knows how to ask questions is able to persist in his
questioning, which involves being able to preserve his orientation toward openness. The art of questioning is the art of questioning ever further i. e., the art of
thinking. It is called dialectic because it is the art of conducting a real dialogue.
Gadamer 2006, 360.
53 On Gadamers interpretation of Aristotelian fairness and law, see Frivaldszky
2007, 38 67.
54 Bubner/Cramer/Wiehl 1970.
55 See Berti 2003, 14, 16 f.
56 See Rortys claim that he is anti-dualist, Rorty 1999, xix.
267
form of radical criticism, cannot show the way for right practical philosophy that aims at achieving justice.
It is, in our opinion, not the analytic57 but the continental tradition of
practical philosophy that should be followed. It is the one that reaches
back to classical (ancient and medieval) roots in a way that allows for
the reconstruction of the spirit of that tradition, both in terms of the
form of dialectical thinking and the substance of classical natural-law
thought. In light of that, we may state that the questions of practical philosophy, hermeneutical understanding, and dialectical argumentative
logic have to be directed to truth in the sense of natural law (i. e. the nature of things and relationships). This also applies to an open, argumentative and rhetorically-oriented discourse based on opinions and appearances, the outcome of which is therefore always uncertain. In its Aristotelian and Ciceronian sense, dialectical thinking (to be used by lawyers)
seeks to distinguish between true and false by way of clarifying the question in a debate between opposed views, through highlighting the contradictions in the arguments of the opponent.58 (The use of dialectical syllogisms that are true in the sense of formal logic does not, however, exclude the probable truth of premises, which are determined on the basis of
considerable opinions [endoxa] regarded as true. Thus, in a late medieval
context we may speak of a debate of dialectical syllogisms, which is aimed at
determining which of the syllogisms leads to the most plausible and most
probable, i. e. most persuasive, truth.)59 Finally, we may add that according to Cicero, only those in possession of the dialectical method can become lawyers.60 A dialectically coherent juristic opinion, being either true
or false, follows the nature of things, as the devices of dialectic follow and
exhibit the internal structure and nature of things. It is not so much the
middle Platonist dichotomous logic of Porphyry, but the nature of the
field of practical philosophy that suggests that the determination of the
57 A seminal survey, and also an example, of this current is Bdig 2004.
58 Play 1988, 97 f. Logical coherence, which dialectical argumentation allows for,
leads not only to logical rightness, but is capable of expressing substantial truth
(i. e. the right order of things). Cicero discusses the virtue and capacity to recognise
the natural order of the whole world, and describes human community within
that world as something that is based on nature, which still requires the recognition of one another as fellow humans. He then describes the science of rational
debate, i. e. dialectic, which is the art of distinguishing between true and false, as
something that aims at protecting these recognitions. See De legibus, 1.60 1.62.
59 Errera 2006, 58 f.
60 Play 1988, 98.
268
Jnos Frivaldszky
due (iustum) of the respective Other is possible only on the basis of an

assessment of arguments considered in the interpersonal dimension (i. e.
a dia-logos, and discussed in a dialectical argumentative debate).61
The pragmatism of classical Roman lawyers does not show the characteristics of Platonic essentialism but rather Aristotelian natural law and
dialectical thinking. This latter could follow the nature of things, thus
being pragmatically essentialist and pragmatically philosophic in a dialectical-controversive (i. e. discursive, way at the same time).62 The same applies to the glossators, too. Thus, the anti-Platonic arguments of postmodernist criticism do not concern the validity and acceptability of classical practical philosophy.
The way of exercising justice has always been the central question of
practical philosophy. The question of right (i. e. just and fair) action has
been, since the classical age, part of the more general philosophical problem of the right way of life. Juristic arguments concerning human rights
can, however, be said in very general terms to be problem-avoidingly
technical and pragmatist, and in certain matters politically and ideologically charged in favour of the fashionable intellectual currents already
mentioned. Both ways depart from the right (classical) way of practical
philosophy. Still, the conception of juristic knowledge as true philosophy advocated by Ulpian seems to show a way that avoids both errors,
even for todays lawyers, and even if the great jurist only summarised
the fundamental principles. The work and thought of the glossators, in
turn, has shown a way that can and ought to be followed even nowadays.
The classical natural-law approach of practical philosophy, whose Aristotelian version we regard as desirable,63 was characteristic of both the
classical Roman jurists and the glossators. This way of thinking took
the nature of interpersonal relations, considered to be real, as its starting
point. It thereby aimed at giving everyone his or her legal due, rather than
fighting for some kind of a presumed due in the sense of some particular
political or moral philosophy, which is often the case nowadays. As the
above discussion has made clear, the legal epistemology of the classical jurists is intimately linked to the anatomy of human relations they descri61 See DAgostino 2007, xiii f.
62 Villey 2003, 104 106, 429 430.
63 Here, the cleavage is not within English-speaking theories, but between the analytical post-metaphysical and traditional currents or natural law. Aristotle, the
most important figure of practical philosophy, represents a link between the
two, his pragmatism allowing only for a minimal metaphysical content in his categories of analysis, method and approach. Cf. Frivaldszky 2007, 38 67.
269
bed. This epistemology was characterised by dialectical argumentation, a

mode of controversy determining the legal nature of interpersonal relations in a constructive way, unlike the (often implicit) conflictual anthropology of postmodernism and the related power-oriented epistemology.
In terms of the sources of law, classical Roman lawyers did not rely on
the exclusiveness of rigid rules, not least because their quest for law and
justice was oriented in practice by broad legal principles of action in todays sense. Thus, the way to overcome the exclusiveness of rules, which
captured modernist legal thinking, does not lead through a political
and ideological dogmatism of conceptions of justice formulated in a doctrinaire way, nor through a subjective nihilism with occasional reference
to these conceptions, but is rather the well known path of classical Roman
lawyers. It is therefore a welcome development that ancient and medieval
dialectical debate and argumentation is an increasingly popular field of
research, which indirectly contributes to our knowledge of classical
legal thinking. At the heart of the logic of law there is the study of dialectic as Michel Villey suggestively puts it.64 The method of controversy, he adds, could be the method of right legal thinking and practice, if
applied in a well-grounded and self-reflective way. Since, as already mentioned, the classical Roman jurists way of thinking was shaped by the dialectic of Aristotle, and was preserved by the glossators,65 the study of Aristotelian dialectic seems inevitable. This, we should emphasise, opens the
way to the exploration of the intersubjective argumentative dimension of
the practical rationality of classical natural law. Dialectic thus transposes
the traditional questions of practical philosophy into the interpretive hermeneutics of interpersonal relations. This calls us to explore and rethink the
classical sense of the action-guiding function of legal principles, and a
number of other traditional questions of legal philosophy, for example,
fairness, observance of law, or the determination of the share due to
the Other.
Among the glossators, due to the influence of the greatest thinkers,
the view spread that the science of law (legalis scientia) did not merely depend on philosophy but that iurisprudentia actually was philosophy.66 Ap-
64 Villey 1967, 81 82.

65 Villey 2003, 105 106, 429 430, 466 467. Cf. Giuliani 1966; Frivaldszky
2009.
66 Padovani 1997, 200.
270
Jnos Frivaldszky
parently, this idea found support in a relevant passage of Ulpian.67 At the

same time, the definition of wisdom, understood in the Middle Ages as
philosophy, said that it was the knowledge of things human and divine,
the science of just and unjust. This definition was passed down through
the tradition of Roman law, where it was understood as jurisprudence,
and it was after this development and with this content that in the Middle Ages jurisprudence and philosophy were identified on the basis of the
heritage of Roman law. If the classics generally assert this, then the profession of the lawyer is not to create human relations as some kind of
god through arguments or legal acts and according to various fashionable
conceptions of justice, but to explore the order of things, the nature of
human relations, as a quasi-philosopher in the classical sense. The same
applies to the sphere of validity of ones arguments as well. We therefore
accept doubt that stems from opinion in the Socratic sense. This method
of continuous questioning, we hope, guides us towards truth through
probabilities, by way of carefully constructed questions and answers
that are open to reality and the arguments of the Other. This non-sophistic tradition of dialectic warns us that logically sound argumentative justification can never depart from truth, which it seeks to approximate. In
this respect, it seems worthwhile to compare the figures of the orator, the
sophist, the dialectician, and the philosopher, in their Aristotelian senses.
We cannot now discuss the relationship of the orator, who uses methods
of persuasion over an audience, to legal argumentation. The complexity
and problems of that kind of relationship are well illustrated in the
works of Cicero.68 Rather, we should have a look at the argumentative
and intellectual patterns of the sophist, the dialectician, and the philosopher.69 In terms of method, the sophist could be a dialectician, whereas
the difference is in their intentions: the arguments of the dialectician
are directed at the thing itself, while the sophist merely utilises the appearance of justice. Dialectic, on the other hand, takes a middle path be67 Iuri operam daturum prius nosse oportet, unde nomen iuris descendat. est
autem a iustitia appellatum: nam, ut eleganter celsus definit, ius est ars boni
et aequi. Dig. 1.1.1. pr. Ulpianus 1 inst. Cuius merito quis nos sacerdotes appellet: iustitiam namque colimus et boni et aequi notitiam profitemur, aequum
ab iniquo separantes, licitum ab illicito discernentes, bonos non solum metu poenarum, verum etiam praemiorum quoque exhortatione efficere cupientes, veram
nisi fallor philosophiam, non simulatam affectantes. Dig. 1.1.1.1. pr. Ulpianus 1
inst.
68 See Frivaldszky 2007, 86 f.
69 See Sichirollo 1961, 113.
271
tween sophistic and philosophy, being a relative of the former in method

but not in intention, and of the latter in the intention directed at the
thing itself but not in the theoretical deductive (scientific) method
(used by the philosopher). The dialectician, rightly understood, looks
for the nature of things in an open argumentative debate, starting from
generally shared opinions. If, however, we understand philosophy of
law not in the modernist sense of an abstract science that aims at building
a theoretical system from axioms by way of deduction, but as was suggested earlier on use dialectic in the field of law in accordance with the
scope of practical philosophy, then the deductive element is limited to the
internal structure of individual syllogisms (i. e. the logical way to the conclusion). We have already mentioned that the premises of syllogisms are
still determined on the basis of probabilities, and dialectical debate aims
precisely to determine which selection of premises leads, by way of syllogism, to more plausible conclusions. Thus, the debates of the glossators
represent debates of syllogisms. In their method of argumentation aimed
at a just and lawful solution but oriented by probabilities, they remained
faithful to Aristotle, as it can hardly be overlooked how rarely the Stagirite
used formal syllogisms in his scientific writings.70 Nor, therefore, can the
science of law follow another method. Classical Roman jurists and the
glossators did not choose to deductively construct a system, but followed
the way of classical Aristotelian natural law and dialectical arguments.71
6. Neo-classical theory of law is practical philosophy but it fails

on the final issue of legal validity
The emergent school of natural-law thinking that is labelled neo-classical shows that a modernist (Kantian, analytic, somehow positivistic)
and perhaps liberal current appeared within the domain of the classical
natural-law tradition.72 Or rather the liberal individualist positivist and
analytic theory of law has become, since Herbert Hart,73 more open to
70 Sichirollo 1961, 116 f.
71 Villey 2003, 429 430, 466 467.
72 The founders of the neo-classical school say right at the beginning of their essay,
in which they sketch a synthetical theoretical construct, that their theory differs
in many respects from those of Aristotle or Aquinas, even if they use the common language of Thomistic natural law. See Grisez/Boyle/Finnis 1987, 99.
73 Hart 1994, 185 212.
272
Jnos Frivaldszky
certain elements of the (classical) natural-law tradition, as we mentioned

in the introduction. Anyhow, the Anglo-American version of neo-classical
natural law, which never departed from a moderate positivist stance and
focused on the perspective of practical philosophy, has brought no real
success, as it was unable to give an acceptable new theoretical synthesis.74
It could not really solve the core substantive problems of legal validity
and normativity, and could only address questions of moral and political
philosophy. We may therefore say that it failed in practice both as a natural-law theory and a philosophy of law, since neo-classical natural lawyers
cannot and do not want to question the validity of positive law that contradicts the fundamental rules of natural law with an apodictic legal argument, with the objectivity of A non-A.75 This shows the error of their
practical philosophy, which manifests itself most conspicuously in the
consequences of the elimination of human nature (in a theoretical and
essentialist sense) from their theory of law. Thus, this theory may be capable of enriching a theory of positive law with some moral elements,
but not of conceptually grasping legal validity and fundamental normative contents of natural law in a legal philosophical way. The knowledge
of lawyers is not only of a practical-philosophical nature (i. e. based on
arguments and seeking to find the right and justifiable decision), but is
primarily organised by questions of legal validity, which, in their most
fundamental contents, are located in the philosophical domain of
truth. A decision (or norm, institution, etc.) that can be justified with
dialectical arguments has sense, justification and thus legal power only
within the framework of natural-law validity (i. e. truth).76 Some fundamental and necessarily true syllogisms stem from human nature itself. In
these, true premises lead to necessarily true conclusions (i. e. to certain
fundamental rights and legal institutions). It is only within this domain
of truth that the world of dialectical argumentation, ruled by probabilities, can be understood as a valid (justified) legal argumentation.
74 See the most recent volumes of criticism in Italy: Scandroglio 2008; Di Blasi
2008.
75 Finnis 1999, 363 366.
76 Frivaldszky 2011, 149 158; Frivaldszky 2010a.
273
7. By way of conclusion
According to the classics, dialectical logic substituted for interpersonal argumentation in the field of questions of practical philosophy dominated
by the logic of probable truth. Their exploration of reality thus did not
use the scientific means of proof by deductive inferences, but wanted to
explore truth through dialectical debates, remaining always in the field
of probabilities. St. Thomas Aquinas, in turn, made human nature the
basis of practical philosophy (i. e. arguments based on the law of nature).
Thus, the truths of this nature, i. e. the few fundamental rights (like the
right to life) and institutions (such as marriage, family) that stem from
those truths by way of apodictic syllogisms, delimit the probably true
domain of dialectic argumentation. This completes the heritage of classical natural lawyers.
Finding the widely shared starting points of thinking (endoxa) necessary for practising classical dialectic today seems easy, as these can hardly
be anything other than human rights. Still, they do not make a totally
secure starting point for argumentation. Libertarian human rights that
have been traditionally considered as going against human nature, yet
nowadays appearing and finding radical advocates in public discourse
(e. g. same-sex couples right to marriage), are shaped by public opinion
organised by mainstream media and often ruled by politics. The question, then, is how far, in what sense, and why these considerable views
are widely shared. We deny, on the one hand, that all opinions should
be held true as the sophists thought, and assert, on the other hand,
that public opinion is strongly shaped by powerful actors, with the consequence that most often it is only one opinion that seems true. Given
the lack of freely and widely shared opinions necessary for dialectical debate, it is difficult to be sure that the play of opposed arguments is going
to lead to probable truth. We therefore think that we should be even
more consistently faithful to the moral truths of Aquinass philosophical
anthropology in terms of the basic human-related moral questions
which are truths accessible to every human being through his or her
own nature and it is only within the limits of these that dialectical debate can and should take place. Thus, if our dialectical argument leads to
a conclusion that is contrary to human nature as determined by philosophical anthropology or if you like the theory of moral philosophy,
then however logical or persuasive the argument may seem and however
widely shared it is among lawyers, it is substantially incorrect. In such
cases, we started from endoxa or apparent endoxa and oriented ourselves
274
Jnos Frivaldszky
towards what was or seemed probable, yet we did not come to truth but
to falsehood. In order that dialectical argumentation (probably) comes to
true conclusions, it has to be based on generally shared wise opinions having in themselves arguments containing the seeds of truth (argumenta
veritatis) rather than apparent truths distorted by the media. Moreover,
argumentation constantly has to be aimed at truth, otherwise the truth
is lost.
It is therefore an extremely important question, both theoretically and
in practice, that precisely what we regard as the content of human rights
should function nowadays as endoxa. The sophist Protagoras argued that
man is the measure of everything, yet the question remains what nature
and what corresponding rights can be attributed to human beings. We
can by no means accept here another one of Protagorass sayings, according to which all opinions are true,77 nor do we think with Protagoras
that an unjust cause should be considered as true just because it is
shown in a positive light by effective rhetorical78 and other media techniques. In the final analysis, it seems that the Universal Decree of Human
Rights, composed in the time of and (partly) by Jacques Maritain, was
based on a de facto consensus in terms of human rights, which achieved
recognition spontaneously, and found a greater degree of natural agreement than it would nowadays. The factual validity of human rights
that is due to an overlapping consensus does not in practice indicate
an identity of philosophical or substantive opinions but perhaps only a
coincidence of formulations on the level of actual normative texts. This
is not something to be downplayed, yet the fragility of consensus,
which results from its lack of grounds, is shown by the fact that it does
not give a reliable theoretical or argumentative basis for the philosophical
determination of rights whose content is debated or for the application of
eventually conflicting rights. Thus, forums of the application of law often
merely echo the public opinion oriented by mainstream media in terms
of the content of certain questionable human rights.79
77 Here we have to agree with Berti 2003, 23.
78 Aristotle remarks that people rightly found the conception of Protagoras outrageous, according to which a weaker (i. e. false) case can be made to appear as
stronger, since this way the argumentation that uses effective rhetorical devices
does not proceed from what is generally accepted to what is probably true by
way of persuasive arguments, but advocates a lie by way of sophistic argumentation. See Rhetoric, 1402a.
79 Berti does not see this danger as he does not approach the question from a juristic
perspective. He is thus justified in thinking that a practical consensus in terms of
275
Postmodernist conceptions of truth and justice, which reject any kind

of grounding, already show some signs of decay. It seems somewhat aimless to demonise essentialism in the field of legal philosophy, as classical
natural-law doctrines have been widely rehabilitated, opening a wide
space for practical wisdom, prudence,80 or leading up to these, fruitful
professional and open dialectical debates. Today, many scholars follow
the path of natural-law practical philosophy, which does not ignore practical truth, while seeking to achieve justice through dialectical argumentation. The question is, then, whether arguments of practical philosophy
can be linked to a philosophically determined human nature and its
truths. We think that justice is inherently and inseparably linked to
truth, of which human nature is also a part. There are a few cogent
norms and institutions of fundamental importance stemming from the
latter, and these are the boundary conditions of valid legal argumentation. It is within these margins that other legal questions can be addressed
in dialectical debate, following the internal logic of things (i. e. legal relations).81
the content of human rights may be a sufficient basis for arguments and refutations based on human rights. See Berti 2003, 20 f.
80 See Nelson 1992, 128 154. See also the conception of practical syllogism developed by Fulvio Di Blasi, which is intended to reconcile natural law and virtue
ethics, Di Blasi 2006, 29 59.
81 Frivaldszky 2010c.
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Index Rerum
Aesthetics 7, 55 f., 66, 110,
114123, 127129, 131134,
136, 138 f., 143, 146, 167
Argumentation 4, 8, 33, 55, 5761,
6366, 71, 75, 80, 93, 110, 115,
117 f., 127, 129, 133, 157, 159,
179, 181 f., 214, 216 f., 226, 234,
241, 245, 253, 255, 259 f., 262 f.,
265275
Art/Artist 7, 39, 4243, 82, 85 f.,
88, 91, 95, 97, 100 f., 103138,
141, 159, 174
Body 43, 86 f., 91 f., 100, 121, 180,
183, 189, 192 f., 205207, 233
Capitalism 39, 43, 46, 48, 50, 53, 98,
209, 248
Conflict 3, 5, 19, 45 f., 48 f., 144,
149, 152, 154, 160, 171, 190,
201203, 205, 209, 215217,
220222, 229, 231 f., 262, 269,
275
Contradiction 2, 28, 30, 35, 40, 42,
44, 4650, 58, 99, 101, 105,
108 f., 113, 122, 131, 145, 169 f.,
200202, 206, 232, 237, 267, 272
Critical theory 110 f., 117, 197 f.,
200, 203, 210
Democracy 30, 36, 38, 91, 116,
213220, 223, 241, 253
Demystification 5457, 6062, 65,
137, 140, 142 f., 146, 154
Emancipation 31, 54, 60, 116, 133,
179, 199 f., 209 f., 214 f., 256,
258, 260262, 267
Enlightenment 54, 57, 69 f., 75, 94,
101, 114, 180, 210, 253
Ethics 4 f., 35, 41, 55, 5759, 6264,

66, 69, 93 f., 109, 117, 152, 180,
241243, 247 f., 252 f., 275
Foundation 25, 29 f., 32, 38, 54 f.,
58, 61, 66, 72, 77, 104, 119, 141,
143, 154156, 159, 162, 182, 186,
188, 192 f., 198, 240 f., 248, 250,
257 f., 274
Hermeneutics 5, 9, 37, 55, 6165,
67, 70, 7479, 135, 138, 145,
154156, 160, 242, 265267, 270
Idealism 39 f., 58, 73, 78, 151
Irresponsibility 4, 8, 56, 87, 253
Justice 28 f., 36, 38, 53 f., 66, 80,
114, 116, 213, 220, 240 f., 243 f.,
246249, 253, 255 f., 260262,
264 f., 267271, 275
Law
3, 6, 23, 29, 31, 7073, 80, 85,

94, 109, 122, 131, 159, 170, 213,
239244, 246250, 255275
Literature 3 f., 6 f., 37, 85, 8790,
9395, 97, 109, 133, 135 f.,
138 f., 140 f., 146 f., 150154,
156, 158 f., 167, 169, 175,
179184, 192193, 233
Metaphysics 2, 13, 18, 22 f., 25 f.,
32 f., 41, 54 f., 57, 69 f., 73, 108,
110112, 117, 150 f., 154, 157,
159, 162, 241 f., 244, 250, 257 f.,
260, 263, 267, 269
Myth 7, 44, 6062, 80, 87, 92 f., 99,
121, 135147, 149160, 183,
197, 199 f., 241
296
Index Rerum
Narrative 48 f., 53, 6165, 80,

8587, 93, 129, 137139, 143 f.,
149, 181 f., 235 f.
Norm 50, 58 f., 61, 6365, 85, 98,
115 f., 118, 136, 140, 161, 183,
214, 226, 232, 246, 257263, 272,
275
Ontology 23, 6971, 7577, 109 f.,
116, 118, 125, 131, 151, 157, 167,
213, 217223
Politics 37, 30, 35, 44, 46, 48, 53,
56, 59, 62 f., 66, 6971, 8587,
93, 108110, 116, 120, 122, 128,
131, 133134, 136, 152, 154, 201,
213223, 234, 225, 229, 232,
234 f., 237, 239243, 248, 250,
252 f., 255 f., 258264, 267269,
272 f.
Postmodernism 5, 57, 93, 97 f., 114,

146, 179, 197, 206, 243, 256 f.,
259263, 267269, 275
Rational/Rationality 9, 30 f., 45, 48,
5371, 76, 85, 88, 98, 100 f., 105,
115, 117, 127, 154, 198, 205210,
214216, 227, 229 f., 236, 255,
257, 262264, 267, 270
Relativism 54, 94, 258, 261, 263
Religion 31, 44, 46, 54, 59 f., 80, 85,
92, 138
Responsibility 5 f., 8, 29, 35, 37, 45,
56, 62, 66, 93 f., 144 f., 253
Truth 24, 55, 65 f., 7577, 92 f.,
114 f., 117, 131, 142, 146, 153 f.,
156, 162, 179, 198 f., 258, 260 f.,
263, 265275
Writer 85, 8891, 136, 173, 184, 192
Name Index
Abastado, Claude 100, 102
Abel, Gnter 221 f.
Abraham 31
Adorno, Gretel 252
Adorno, Theodor W. 7, 4547, 54,
57, 69, 89, 93, 197210, 251-253
Agamemnon 140
Albouy, Pierre 151
Alice in Wonderland 27
Allen, Woody 39
Althusser, Louis 89, 197
Amoretti, Giovanni Giuseppe 169
Andronico, Alberto 3, 7, 239 f., 243,
253, 256 f.
Anouilh, Jean 138, 141, 144, 159
Antigone 138, 141, 144, 151 f., 154,
159
Antoine, Rgis 183
Apel, Karl-Otto 57, 76
Aquinas, Thomas 78, 255, 263, 272274
Arac, Jonathan 3
Aristotle 9, 30, 263, 269, 271 f., 274,
Arnim, Achim von 103 f.
Artaud, Antonin 86, 88, 9092, 145
Atlan, Henri 228
Augustine of Hippo 240
Austin, J. L. 80, 118, 158
Bacchae 145
Bach, Johann Sebastian 78
Bachelard, Gaston 89
Baldessari, John 107 f.
Balkin, Jack M. 244, 247, 256 f.
Barcellona, Mario 264
Barthes, Roland 86, 89, 97, 160
Bataille, Georges 90 f.
Bateson, Gregory 228
Baudelaire, Charles 141
Beardsworth, Richard 3
Beckett, Samuel 8689, 91, 138

Beethoven, Ludwig van 78
Benhabib, Seyla 58, 64, 235
Benjamin, Walter 14, 93, 166, 241,
252 f.
Benveniste, mile 138
Ber, Claude 145
Berger, Peter 233 f.
Berman, Antoine 167
Berti, Enrico 265 f., 274 f.
Biggiero, Luca 227
Blair, Tony 213
Blanchot, Maurice 8690, 136, 145,
245
Blasucci, Luigi 172
Bloom, Harold 159 f.
Blumenberg, Hans 139
Boccioni, Umberto 119
Boggio Marzet Tremoloso, Giulia 7,
9, 149
Bhler, Dietrich 76
Bollack, Jean 156, 160
Boros, Jnos 257
Borradori, Giovanna 243
Boulogne, Jacques 154
Bovary, Emma 44
Boyle, James 244
Boyle, Joseph 263, 272
Brahms, Johannes 78
Brault, Grgoire 182
Breton, Andr 88, 98104, 162
Brubaker, Roger 234236
Bruera, Franca 7, 9, 135, 142
Brunel, Pierre 149, 152, 156
Brunette, Peter 111
Bruni, Leonardo 164 f.
Bubner, Rdiger 12
Burr, Vivien 235
Caillois, Roger
100
298
Name Index
Calvino, Italo 163 f.

Campbell, Shelley 9, 160
Camus, Albert 144
Caputo, John D. 40, 42
Carlson, David 3
Carrino, Agostino 244
Carroll, Lewis 27, 38
Casanova, Jos 60
Cassirer, Ernst 74
Castoriadis, Cornelius 30, 77
Cattin, Emmanuel 7, 13
Cazeaux, Clive 7, 107
Cline, Louis-Ferdinand 86
Cprou, Indian chief 187
Certeau, Michel de 128
Cerulo, Karen A. 233
Chanel, Coco 141
Char, Ren 99, 169 f., 172, 175177
Cheah, Pheng 3
Chirhalwirwa, Gervais 187, 191,
Chiurazzi, Gaetano 10
Cicero, Marcus Tullius 162, 267 f.,
271
Claussen, Detlev 210 f.
Clemens, Justin 109
Clinton, Bill 213
Clot, Yves 49
Cocteau, Jean 138, 140143, 146
Colas, Hubert 145
Compagnon, Antoine 146
Connolly, William 109, 213 f.
Cooper, Frederick 234236
Copp, David 229
Cornell, Drucilla 3, 240
Craig-Martin, Michael 107 f., 110,
114, 133
Cramer, Konrad 266
Crevel, Ren 104
Critchley, Simon 109, 116 f.
Culler, Jonathan 3, 260
Cunico, Gerardo 57, 59
Curi, Fausto 139
DAgostino, Francesco 268
Damas, Gabrielle 190
Damas, Lon-Gontran 179-193,
DArbella, Edmondo 170 f.
de Man, Paul 35
de Montaigne, Michel 250

Deleuze, Gilles 55, 86, 88, 90, 92,
145, 179
Deremetz, Alain 151
Derrida, Jacques 29, 2837, 3943,
55, 8688, 90, 94, 109111, 113,
116118, 120, 122, 130 f., 133,
140, 149, 153, 155159, 161 f.,
164, 166 f., 169 f., 172, 216 f.,
219221, 239253, 256 f., 261,
264
Dewey, John 258 f.
DeWolfe Howe, Mark 259
Di Blasi, Fulvio 272, 275
Dilthey, Wilhelm 69, 78
Disney, Walt 239
Djebar, Assia 163
Drre, Klaus 48
Douzinas, Costas 242
Droysen, Johann Gustav 73
Dumont, Louis 260
Durand, Gilbert 144, 149, 151 f.,
154156
Duras, Marguerite 86 f., 89
Duvenage, Pieter 116 f., 127
Dworkin, Ronald 242
Ehrenberg, Alain 43
Eliot, T. S. 138 f., 141
Emina, Antonella 7, 9, 179
Ernst, Max 97
Errera, Andrea 268
Euripides 156, 159
Eurydice 143
Fairhurst, Angus 108
Favry, Claude 97
Fdida, Pierre 90 f.
Feltham, Oliver 109
Fenichel, Otto 203, 207
Ferraris, Maurizio 9, 56, 249, 251,
253
Ferry, Jean-Marc 7, 9, 54, 56, 58 f.,
6367, 69, 79, 142
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 72, 78, 103
Finnis, John Mitchell 263 f., 272
Fish, Stanley 149, 256
Foerster, Heinz von 226
Name Index
Foster, Hal 98
Foucault, Michel 55, 89 f., 102, 197,
214, 226, 256, 262
Frank, Manfred 39 f.
Frege, Gottlob 80
Freud, Sigmund 53, 86 f., 90, 135,
197, 200206, 208
Fried, Lewis L. B. 3
Fritsch, Matthias 217, 219, 221
Frivaldszky, Jnos 7, 255, 260, 265 f.,
269, 271, 273, 275
Fubini, Mario 172
Fulton, Hamish 120
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 7577, 265 f.
Genet, Jean 89
Genette, Grard 146, 150, 159
George, Robert P. 257, 264
Gergen, Kenneth J. 235
Gey, Steven G. 261
Gide, Andr 159
Giono, Jean 140, 142144
Giraudoux, Jean 140
Giuliani, Alessandro 269
Glasersfeld, Ernst von 226
Glissant, Edouard 179, 181
Gdel, Kurt 34
Godzich, Wlad 3
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 47
Goffman, Erving 234
Goodrich, Peter 3, 239
Gracq, Julien 136
Gray, Carole 120
Green, Andr 85
Greimas, Algirdas Julien 182 f.
Grisez, Germain 263, 272
Grossi, Paolo 260
Grossman, Evelyne 7, 85, 88
Guattari, Flix 92, 145, 179
Guerlac, Suzanne 3
Haacke, Hans 120
Habermas, Jrgen 4, 9, 5660, 63 f.,
67, 94, 109 f., 114120, 122,
127133, 210, 214
Hales, Steven D. 227
Hamlet 249
299
Hart, Herbert Lionel Adolphus 250,

255, 272,
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 48,
7073, 76, 78, 80, 89
Heidegger, Martin 7, 1326, 29, 39,
54 f., 70, 76, 78, 90, 112, 116,
127, 250
Heraclitus 27, 38
Heritier, Paolo 9, 249
Hervada, Javier 265
Hirst, Damien 108
Hobbes, Thomas 222, 240
Hobsbawm, Eric 137
Hoffmann, Florian 3
Hlderlin, Friedrich 88 f.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell 257, 259
Homer 78, 223
Honegger, Arthur 141
Honig, Bonnie 213 f.
Horkheimer, Max 54, 57, 69 f., 117,
198201, 205, 210
Huddy, Leonie 233
Hullot-Kentor, Robert 200
Humboldt, Wilhelm von 69
Hume, Gary 108
Hsch, Sebastian 10
Husserl, Edmund 53, 76, 241, 253
Inglehart, Ronald 60
Ingram, David 58
Ionesco, Eug ne 145
Izutsu, Toshihiko 245
Jakobson, Roman 138, 163165, 168
James, William 257-260
Jenkins, Richard 233
Jesi, Furio 154
Joas, Hans 60, 62
Jocasta 140
Jolles, Andr 138
Jonas, Hans 94
Joyce, James 86, 138
Kafka, Franz 138
Kaitaro, Timo 7, 97, 99, 101, 103,
105
Kant, Immanuel 7072, 78, 88, 112,
115 f., 123, 240, 253
300
Name Index
Kates, Joshua 3
Kelman, Mark 244
Kelsen, Hans 250
Kennedy, Duncan 244
Kester, Grant 128
King Louis XIII 186
Koj ve, Alexandre 89
Kronick, Joseph G. 3
Kuschner, Eva 151
Lacan, Jacques 8790, 93, 197
Ladmiral, Jean-Ren 166
Lafont, Cristina 58 f.
Landy, Michael 108
Laski, Harold Joseph 259
Le Brun, Annie 97 f., 105
Legendre, Pierre 61
Leibniz, Gottfried 71, 222
Leone, Sergio 121
Leopardi, Giacomo 161, 169,
172175
Lro, tienne 185
Lessenich, Stephan 48
Lvi-Strauss, Claude 89, 139, 197
Levinas, Emmanuel 88-90, 241, 264
Lvy, Pierre 91
Lzy, Emmanuel 187
Liddell, Henry George 164 f., 169,
171, 173
Limb 189
Lingua, Graziano 7, 9, 53, 60, 137
Long, Richard 120
Lucas, Sarah 108
Luckmann, Thomas 233 f.
Luhmann, Niklas 46, 262
Luisetti, Federico 10
Luther, Martin 240
Lyon, David 236 f.
Lyotard, Jean-Franois 89
MacIntyre, Alasdair 61
Magritte, Ren 97
Maiso, Jordi 7, 197
Malinowski, Bronislav 137
Malins, Julian 120
Mandeville, Bernard 71
Manzin, Maurizio 255
Marcuse, Herbert 202, 204206
Maritain, Jacques 274

Markantonatos, Gherasimos 170
Marramao, Giacomo 59
Martin, Wallace 3
Martinengo, Alberto 1, 62, 137, 140
Marx, Karl 53, 135, 198, 248
Maturana, Humberto R. 226
Maximin, Daniel 190
McCarthy, Thomas 109
McVeigh, Shaun 242
Medea 142, 144, 151 f., 159
Melville, Stephen 113 f., 117
Mengoni, Luigi 263
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 92
Michaux, Henri 86, 89
Michelfelder, Diane P. 242
Minda, Gary 244, 256
Mittasch, Alwin 221
Molnar, Thomas 260 f.
Monceri, Flavia 7, 225, 228 f.
Montefiore, Allan 41
Mouffe, Chantal 7, 213220
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 78
Murphy, Mark C. 263
Musset, Alfred de 99
Nancy, Jean-Luc 86, 89, 92
Ndagano, Biringanine 187, 191
Nelson, Daniel Mark 275
Nietzsche, Friedrich 1 f., 88, 90, 135,
220223, 228
Nol, Bernard 136
Nogler, Luca 263
Norris, Christopher 3, 10, 60
Noug, Paul 100, 105
Oedipus 144, 151, 159
Oate y Zuba, Teresa 10
Orestes 144
Orpheus 142 f., 145 f., 154
Ostovich, Stephen T. 130 f.
Ounanian, Steven Levon 121125,
131 f.
Padovani, Andrea 270
Palmer, Richard E. 242
Parin, Paul 209
Pascal, Blaise 250
Name Index
Pascher, Manfred 263

Patton, Paul 222
Paul, Jeremy 244
Peirce, Charles Sanders 80, 257 f.
Prec, Georges 135
Perelman, Cham 265
Prez de Tudela Velasco, Jorge 7, 27
Picasso, Pablo 141
Plato 29
Poerksen, Bernhard 226
Play, Elemr 267 f.
Pope, Simon 120
Prometheus 152, 154
Protagoras 274
Proust, Marcel 86
Putnam, Hilary 46, 8 f., 56
Py, Olivier 145 f.
Racine, Roman 151
Ranke, Leopold von 73
Rankin, Jenny 61
Rawls, John 214
Regazzoni, Simone 3
Reginster, Bernard 227
Reicher, Stephen 233
Resta, Caterina 3, 247 f.
Rickert, Heinrich 69
Ricoeur, Paul 56, 6063, 65, 67, 79,
93, 135, 140, 146, 182
Rimbaud, Arthur 103 f.
Rivi re, Jacques 88
Robbe-Grillet, Alain 136
Robelin, Jean 7, 39
Romano, Bruno 239, 262
Rorty, Richard 55, 256-262, 267
Rosenfeld, Michel 3, 239, 244
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 78
Roux, Franca 169, 175
Royle, Nicholas 3
Rummens, Stefan 218 f.
Saar, Martin 222
Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin 169
f., 172, 174, 176 f.
Sarraute, Nathalie 135
Sartre, Jean-Paul 90, 97, 136, 144
Scandroglio, Tommaso 272
Schlag, Pierre 244
301
Schlegel, Friedrich 39, 69

Schmitt, Carl 217220, 222, 240
Schrder, Gerhard 213
Schultz, William R. 3
Schrmann, Reiner 18 f., 21
Scott, Robert 164 f., 169, 171, 173
Searles, Harold 91
Segre, Cesare 146
Sehgal, Tino 120
Senghor, Lopold Sdar 183
Serres, Michel 91
Sichirollo, Livio 266, 271
Siemens, Herman W. 7, 213
Siganos, Andr 151, 154 f.
Siguro, Marino 169172, 175177
Simmel, Georg 47 f.
Smith, Adam 71
Socrates 86
Sophocles 141, 159
Spengler, Oswald 53
Spiridopoulou, Maria 7, 161, 176
Stamatakos, Ioannis 171
Stambaugh, Joan 112
Stannard, Kate 121 f.
Starling, Simon 121 f.
Staten, Henry 216
Steiner, George 173
Stender, Wolfram 199, 206
Stravinsky, Igor 78
Sullivan, Graham 110
Tavor Bannet, Eve 167 f.
Taylor, Charles 60 f.
Taylor, Mark C. 228
Thomassen, Lasse 4
Tilgher, Adriano 172
Tolstoy, Leo 159
Tosel, Andr 60
Trousson, Raymond 151 f., 154, 156
Tushnet, Mark 244
Ulysses 138, 140, 142144
Unger, Roberto Mangabeira 244
Vaghenas, Nasos 169, 171 f.,
175177
Valence, Eugene 164
Valentini, Alvaro 169, 172
302
Name Index
Varela, Francisco J. 226

Vattimo, Gianni 9, 55, 251, 256
Vercellone, Federico 9
Viehweg, Theodor 266
Villa, Dana 214
Villey, Michel 255, 265 f., 268 f.,
271
Vismann, Cornelia 3
Warrington, Ronnie
Watson, Mike 67
Watzlawick, Paul 226

Weber, Max 53 f., 80
Wellmer, Albrecht 64, 114118, 127
Welshon, Rex 227
Wiehl, Reiner 266
Wills, David 111
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 80, 173
Wolf, Christa 135, 159
Wong, James 233
242
Yourcenar, Marguerite
140

Beyond Deconstruction From Hermeneutics T - Alberto Martinengo

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Beyond Deconstruction

Jorge Prez de Tudela Velasco

Giulia Boggio Marzet Tremoloso

Deconstruction at its End? Preliminary Remarks

The case for deconstruction

Deconstruction at its End? Preliminary Remarks

wide range of fields, rather than encompassing a collection of shared assumptions.1

Putnam 1992, 132.

Deconstruction at its End? Preliminary Remarks

Deconstruction at its End? Preliminary Remarks

plication that the decision to take stock of deconstruction might be taken

Deconstruction at its End? Preliminary Remarks

Leaving Philosophy? Heidegger, Bauen, Lassen 1

this final necessity, it is as though the question revealed itself, through

Heidegger 1984, 6, 20.

Leaving Philosophy? Heidegger, Bauen, Lassen

Heidegger 1984, 23.

task, in an almost military tone, to progress (vordringen) by way of a

Leaving Philosophy? Heidegger, Bauen, Lassen

as we dwell, Heidegger writes.13 Or we might say: insofar as we build.

Rckgang, the return, as it becomes clearer, has to radicalise in departure.

Leaving Philosophy? Heidegger, Bauen, Lassen

that Heidegger gave to such a Zwischen is Ge-stell. As an enframing which

Leaving Philosophy? Heidegger, Bauen, Lassen

words, as Reiner Schrmann had understood it since the Beitrge of the

Leaving Philosophy? Heidegger, Bauen, Lassen

of a tradition which, through its consideration, it still regards. How are

as a leading word in the service of thought.32 As Heidegger indicates,

Leaving Philosophy? Heidegger, Bauen, Lassen

Waiting: The Impossible

Let us suppose, for a moment, something impossible: that deconstruction

Jorge Prez de Tudela Velasco

Derrida 1994a, 35.

Waiting: The Impossible

could then be said to be fully, wholly, presentably fair: because either it

Derrida 1994a, 55.

Jorge Prez de Tudela Velasco

Derrida 1986; Derrida 1996a.

Waiting: The Impossible

effect? A celebrated analysis by Derrida has applied this same logic to a

Jorge Prez de Tudela Velasco

Waiting: The Impossible

Jorge Prez de Tudela Velasco

if there is no principle (start, origin, but also power of command, of

12 Derrida 1972a, 367 368.

Waiting: The Impossible

Jorge Prez de Tudela Velasco

1967a; Derrida 1967b; Derrida 1980; Derrida 1982.

Waiting: The Impossible

Jorge Prez de Tudela Velasco

Does It Make Sense to Speak

Proceeding this way, he advances Derridean analysis through a long

Frank 1975, 283.

Does It Make Sense to Speak about Deconstructing the Subject?

non-identified with themselves. They are relational entities subsisting on

Derrida 1990a, 98.

Does It Make Sense to Speak about Deconstructing the Subject?

Manzoni crossed himself out in his own profession by creating a piece of

Nor I nor any man that but man is

Does It Make Sense to Speak about Deconstructing the Subject?

Adorno 1973, 360.

age to appear a winner and support oneself in a perpetual narcissistic

Does It Make Sense to Speak about Deconstructing the Subject?